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August 31, 2007

TT: Just an old-fashioned con man

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is half New York, half not. From East Haddam, Connecticut, I report on a rare revival of High Button Shoes by Goodspeed Musicals. Off Broadway, it's Charles Mee's Iphigenia 2.0. How's that for an incongruous pairing? Anyway, here goes nothing:

Long before Phil Silvers was Sgt. Bilko, he was stopping the show as Harrison Floy, the old-time con man who is the star of "High Button Shoes," one of the biggest musical-comedy hits of 1947. It ran for 727 performances, brought choreographer Jerome Robbins his first Tony--and then, like so many other well-received musicals, disappeared into the theatrical memory hole. Except for two numbers restaged by Robbins 42 years later for "Jerome Robbins' Broadway," "High Button Shoes" has never been revived in New York. Goodspeed Musicals, which regularly exhumes forgotten shows, put it on in 1982, but that appears to be the only time the show has been produced anywhere since its original Broadway run. Now Goodspeed is giving "High Button Shoes" a second outing at its handsome headquarters, an immaculately preserved 1876 opera house overlooking the Connecticut River. I drove up there the other day to satisfy my longstanding curiosity about a long-forgotten musical and discovered, to my delight, that "High Button Shoes" is not for antiquarians only....

I'm not in the habit of praising stridently political drama, but I know a good thing when I see one, and Charles Mee's "Iphigenia 2.0," a contemporary rewrite of Euripides' "Iphigenia in Aulis" in which the audience is tacitly invited to reflect on the hubris and downfall of George W. Bush, is an avant-garde spectacular that is more than sufficiently exciting to overcome any objections you may have to onstage sermonizing.

No free link, he sighed. Get thee to a newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted August 31, 8:43 AM

TT: Jammin' with Toscanini's hep cats

My enthusiasm over the release of The New Friends of Rhythm: 1939-1947 Performances (about which you can read more in the Top Five section of the right-hand column) has spilled over into a "Sightings" column for Saturday's The Wall Street Journal. In it I fill in the background of this fascinating group, which briefly became so popular that it got written up in Time. Then I take a broader look at the larger phenomenon of jazzing-the-classics recordings, and offer some speculations on what its decline tells us about the shaky state of classical music in America.

To find out more--including what Ayn Rand, of all people, had to say about jazzed-up classics--pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the newly re-christened "Weekend Journal." I'll be there.

UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read this column by going here.

Posted August 31, 8:35 AM

TT: Almanac

"Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made."

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Posted August 31, 8:28 AM

August 30, 2007

CAAF: Toolahroolah, MVY. Howdy, Indiana.

My companions at Martha's Vineyard, Hortense and Boozy, used to work together as editors at a publishing house in New York. One of their work jokes was a video concept called "Girls in Publishing Gone Wild," which would feature scintillating footage of girls who wear glasses unbuttoning their cardigans and struggling to extricate themselves from their turtlenecks as buds of crumpled Kleenex emerged provocatively from their shirt cuffs.

Our weekend together had a similar quality. We drank a lot of tea, and stayed up late watching Room With A View and eating candy-colored macaroons from Chelsea. At the beach, we clambered around talking about Enid Blyton and Isabella Blow. We visited three bookstores, and my souvenirs from the trip are roughed-up copies of John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and a book called The Sea-Horse and Its Relatives. The latter, written by two Australian museum curators and published in 1958, reads like something a character in Wodehouse might write. A chapter called "Interesting Habits" begins, "What is the most remarkable member of the Animal Kingdom? Few would disagree with awarding the palm to the female of the human species, but of all the marine creatures, as Sir J. Arthur Thomson has written, Sea-horses ... 'are the most "kenspeckle" creatures of the sea, and this is saying a good deal ...'" Indeed.

This weekend I'm traveling again, this time to the Wienerschnitzel family reunion. This is a reunion of my mom's umpteen brothers and sisters held biennially on my grandfather's farm in southern Indiana. Lots of croquet and volleyball, and gathering in the living room to hear my musical cousin pound out "House of the Rising Sun" on the piano. As the finale, the uncles, who will have been drinking beer in the barn all afternoon, will troop out to a distant field and set off fireworks for the delight of the crowd that is watching, amid fragrant clouds of bug spray, on the lawn -- a display that always marks for me the official close of summer.

Posted August 30, 12:35 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)
• Grease (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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 Midsummer Night's Dream (play, G, suitable for very bright children, reviewed here)

Posted August 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn't answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs. I didn't have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger's breath."

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Posted August 30, 12:00 AM

August 29, 2007

TT: Way up north (II)

• AUGUST 6 To Stonington, Maine, memorably portrayed by John Marin in two gorgeous watercolors hanging in Colby College's Marin Collection. (Go here and click on the seventh image to get an impression of what this delightful coastal fishing town looks like.) Then via mail boat to Isle au Haut, seven miles off the Maine coast, which I last visited in 2003 in order to write the following Wall Street Journal column:

Six months ago, I bought a Fairfield Porter lithograph. Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a rocky cove near the southern tip of a remote island off the coast of Maine, looking at the same scene Porter viewed when he sketched "Isle au Haut." To get there, I hiked for two sweaty hours along a narrow woodland trail, stepping over snakes and trying not to turn an ankle. What possessed a flabby, chair-bound critic like me to make such a journey? It seemed like a good idea as I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, but I started having second, third and fourth thoughts as I trudged up the Goat Trail of Isle au Haut.

Porter isn't exactly a household name, but many connoisseurs consider him one of the greatest American artists (and art critics) of the 20th century, an astonishingly original representational painter whose style fuses two seemingly disparate idioms: the intimate domestic realism of Bonnard and Vuillard and the excitingly free brushwork of Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists. I knew I wanted to own something by Porter when I first started buying art, and I was lucky to find a good impression of this, the last lithograph he made before his death in 1975 at the age of 68. In it, a cove rimmed by pine-topped cliffs is loosely rendered in flat, irregularly shaped blotches of green, grey, tan and dusty pink. It is at once abstract and representational, a heightened vision of the craggy Maine landscapes Porter loved. When I heard that the Portland Museum of Art was showing a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, I got the idea of visiting the show, then looking for the actual cove portrayed in "Isle au Haut."

This turned out to be rather more complicated than trying to find the well-known spots where Monet or Cézanne stood when painting their celebrated plein air landscapes. The isolated Isle au Haut is no resort. It consists mainly of rugged wilderness, though it is also home to 47 year-round residents who pronounce its name "eye-la-HOE." The only place for visitors to stay is the tiny Keeper's House Inn. Unfazed by the lack of electricity or telephones, I booked a room, and a few weeks later clambered aboard the mail boat from Stonington to Isle au Haut. Just two days before, I'd been walking through the Portland Museum, where I found a 1974 painting by Porter called "Cliffs of Isle au Haut," the original version of my lithograph. The painting is three times larger and more brightly colored, but the composition is identical, and I felt sure it was a good omen.

Once I got to Isle au Haut, though, I realized I was in over my head. The 4,700-acre island was bigger than I'd thought (New York's Central Park covers just 843 acres), and the shoreline contained a wealth of coves accessible only on foot. How to find the right one in the four days I'd allotted--if at all? I showed my kindly hosts a photo of "Isle au Haut" included in a book of Porter's prints. They told me where it might be and swore I could find the spot without unreasonable difficulty. The next morning, I climbed into a battered SUV and rattled down a dirt road to the long hikers' path known as the Goat Trail that was supposed to lead me there.

About the next two hours I will say nothing other than that I spent much of it cursing for having embarked so casually on so self-evidently impossible a task. Then I stumbled over a ridge, stepped between two trees and onto a huge flat rock, and knew at once that I was standing more or less where Porter had stood. The pines were taller, making the cliffs somewhat less imposing, and three decades' worth of waves had gnawed at the shoreline. But the cool white light was the same, and so were the rocks, tan and green and--yes--pink, just as Porter had painted them. I pulled a disposable camera out of my backpack, composed a scene in the viewfinder that resembled "Isle au Haut" and took a snapshot.

As I staggered back down the Goat Trail, the baritone rumble of the offshore lobster boats ringing faintly in my ears, I remembered the remark by Porter that Justin Spring chose as the epigraph of "Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art." "When I paint," he wrote, "I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful." Once I returned to New York and looked at "Isle au Haut" with new eyes, I understood at last the profound truth behind those deceptively simple words. Yes, Porter's lithograph was realistic in the sense that it portrayed a real place recognizably--but the amazing freedom with which he transformed its contours into fields of color summed up the difference between life and art.

In the pocket of my jeans was a stone I'd found in the cove, its richly mottled surface reproducing with near-perfect fidelity the colors of "Cliffs of Isle au Haut." Now it rests on my desk, a souvenir of the August morning when I beheld the beautiful reality embodied in that even more beautiful work of art.

The Keeper's House Inn hasn't changed a bit since 2003. It's still far beyond the reach of cellphones and e-mail. The proprietors, Jeff and Judi Burke, still serve the tastiest meals imaginable. The lighthouse still beams its gentle reddish-orange glow through the windows of the candlelit third-floor garret bedroom. You can read all about it in the pages of Island Lighthouse Inn: A Chronicle, Jeff's engagingly written story of life on Isle au Haut. Alas, you can't stay there anymore, for Jeff and Judi are putting the Keeper's House Inn up for sale, and they will no longer be taking guests after the end of this season. I'm glad I got to see them one more time.

• AUGUST 9 Back to Stonington via mail boat, and from there down the coast to Ogunquit, Maine, to see The King and I at Ogunquit Playhouse (about which more here) and eat as many of Flo's Steamed Hot Dogs as I could stuff down my gullet. Order a jar of Flo's relish by mail--you won't be sorry.

Would that I could recommend the Ogunquit Museum of American Art with like fervor, but it was a disappointment, a small museum that prefers hosting second- and third-rate traveling exhibitions to hanging the treasures of its permanent collection. The view is fabulous, but otherwise my visit was a waste of time.

• AUGUST 10 To East Haddam, Connecticut, home of Goodspeed Musicals, which is currently performing High Button Shoes (about which more in Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column). Housed in an 1876 opera house that overlooks the Connecticut River, Goodspeed Musicals is one of the most picturesque theaters in America, and it also has the near-overwhelming advantage of being just fifteen minutes away from the River Tavern, my favorite of all the restaurants at which I've dined in the course of my theater-related travels.

Instructions for maximum pleasure: (1) Don't eat lunch. (2) Make a 5:30 reservation in order to dine at leisure and get to Goodspeed in plenty of time for an eight o'clock curtain. (3) Order the chocolate soufflé. (4) Spend the night at the Bishopsgate Inn, conveniently located a block from the theater. (5) Drive home the next day, secure in the knowledge that you've had a fabulous time.

(Second of two parts)

Posted August 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not."

William James, "Vacations"

Posted August 29, 12:00 AM

August 28, 2007

TT: Back where he belongs

I took a six-month layoff from writing Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography, to work on the libretto of The Letter. Two weeks ago I picked up the threads of Armstrong's life, and on Saturday I finished writing a ten-thousand-word chapter about his return to New York in 1929, his Broadway debut, and his emergence as a popular celebrity.

To celebrate, I'm going to share with you the section from "Playing Frantic: Fame, 1929-1930" in which I describe how Armstrong began recording with big bands. Enjoy!

* * *

That afternoon Armstrong returned to the studio to cut two sides with the Luis Russell band, augmented by Eddie Condon on banjo and Lonnie Johnson on guitar. The first was "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," a ballad by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields that had become popular the year before when it was sung in Blackbirds of 1928, the longest-running all-black Broadway revue of the Twenties. This version, which opens with a melancholy, sweet-toned instrumental chorus split down the middle by Armstrong (who uses a straight mute) and J.C. Higginbotham, appears at first glance to have little in common with the daredevil small-group sides that had made the trumpeter's name a byword among jazz musicians. It almost sounds as if he were sitting in with his beloved Guy Lombardo. But then he puts down his trumpet and croons an ingeniously oblique half-scatted paraphrase of the melody (Armstrong never sang a melody straight) accompanied by three gently mooing saxophones and Pops Foster's bowed bass, followed by a high-flying trumpet chorus that sheers daringly away from the tune and soars off into the blue, ascending toward (but failing to hit) a climactic high D.

The results exemplified the recipe for a three-chorus solo he had shared with the New Orleans trumpeter Wingy Manone: "The first chorus I plays the melody, the second chorus I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus I routines." They also showed that he could make a ballad sound as jazzy as a blues, a lesson that was not lost on his contemporaries. Ethel Waters paid homage to him in 1932 with a recording of "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" in which she imitates with uncanny accuracy the vocal chorus from his 1929 recording, a witty and knowing tribute that also serves as an indication of the extent of his fast-growing celebrity.

What inspired Armstrong to record so sentimental a song in so personal a manner? The credit, amazingly enough, seems to belong to Tommy Rockwell, his tone-deaf producer. Years later Armstrong discussed the session with George Avakian:

Rockwell knew it had to be different. The song had been on the radio for almost a year, and everybody did it like cheerful--"One day I'll buy you diamond rings, baby," and all that. Rockwell thought I should do it like life really is--the guy really can't give her anything but love. So he had Brother Higginbotham and the saxophones play it way down low, and I sang it that way, too.

And whose idea was it for Armstrong to record a show tune? His autobiographical writings shed no light on the matter, but three months earlier he had accompanied Lillie Delk Christian on her OKeh recordings of "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "I Must Have That Man," another song from Blackbirds of 1928. Though he had never before recorded such fare under his own name, he had been playing it in public since his Sunset Cafe days in Chicago. Thus he might have suggested it to Rockwell, just as he was undoubtedly responsible for picking the last song recorded that day, a rocking instrumental named after a celebrated Storyville whorehouse whose black madam he remembered fondly: "Lulu White was a famous woman of the sporting world in Storyville...She had a big house on Basin Street called Mahogany Hall...The song was written after her house had gotten so famous...Rich men came there from all parts of the world to dig those beautiful Creole prostitutes...And pay big money." "Mahogany Hall Stomp" shows off the Russell band at its swinging best, with Pops Foster thumping out a fat-toned bass line as Armstrong romps through three muted solo choruses (one of which consists solely of a sunlit high B flat stretched out for ten breathtaking bars) whose pellucid simplicity would be echoed at one time or another by virtually every jazz trumpeter of the Thirties.

But even if it was Armstrong's own idea to record "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "Mahogany Hall Stomp," he could not have done so without Rockwell's approval, and it was probably the OKeh executive's idea to pair him with Luis Russell's band as well. The success of the collaboration sealed his artistic fate: from 1929 to 1947 he would be the nominal leader of a big band, criss-crossing the country to play show tunes and pop songs for dancers who knew little or nothing of jazz. Many jazz fans came to feel that Armstrong had "sold out" by switching to big-band accompaniment, but in fact he had been fronting such groups ever since he quit King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1924. Had he done otherwise, he would never have become a star, though it would not have occurred to him, or the other well-known jazz instrumentalists of his generation, to do anything else. Dancing was where the money was. Even such stalwarts of the New Orleans style as Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton bowed to the inevitable and added saxophone sections to their bands. Most of the important small-group jazz recordings made between 1925 and 1940 were the work of studio-only pickup ensembles whose members were drawn from the ranks of the big touring dance bands.

Not until World War II laid waste to those ranks did small-group jazz become a big-time business, and even then the cautious Armstrong waited until two years after the war was over to dispose of his expensive orchestra and start working with a six-piece combo. He loved the Hot Five, but he saw no reason why he couldn't make equally good music with a big band--and he was right.

Posted August 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"An announcement once appeared in a quarterly, against the name of the present writer, of an article to be entitled Conrad, the Soul and the Universe. The exasperation registered in this formula explains, perhaps, why the article was never written."

F.R. Leavis, "Joseph Conrad" (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted August 28, 12:00 AM

August 27, 2007

TT: Way up north (I)

• AUGUST 2 To Lincoln, Massachusetts, home of Walden Pond (actually, it's in Concord, just across the town line) and the Gropius House, about which I wrote in my last "Sightings" column:

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a tiny cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, lived there for two years, then published a book about it. "Most men," he wrote, "appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have." A century later, a German architect in flight from the Nazis moved to a meadow a stone's throw from Walden Pond, where he put up a small house that is as deeply considered a dwelling as has ever existed.

The Gropius House, built by Walter Gropius in 1938, is a simple two-story structure that still looks breathtakingly contemporary. Its clean, right-angled lines and uncluttered floor plan are the very essence of the architectural style now known to aficionados as midcentury modernism. I paid a visit to the Gropius House the other day, and as I pulled into the driveway, I thought, This house could have been built yesterday--except that in 2007, few people would be willing to build a home that looks so utterly unlike the ones in which their neighbors live....

Like the Louis Armstrong House in Queens and the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore (which is, alas, no longer open to the public), the Gropius House has been painstakingly restored to its original condition, and it looks as if its designer-owner had just stepped out for a walk. The walls are covered with very appropriate art, including a Hans Hofmann watercolor and a gorgeous lithograph by Toko Shinoda, an artist whom I now long to add to the Teachout Museum. In my experience, most midcentury-modern house-museums have superior tour guides, and this one was no exception: Joyce Bowden showed off its myriad marvels with informed and irresistible enthusiasm.

Next stop: Peterborough, New Hampshire, home of the MacDowell Colony, where Paul Moravec spent part of the summer writing the first three scenes of The Letter and Thornton Wilder wrote most of Our Town (which is widely thought to be a fictional portrayal of life in Peterborough). Dinner at Pearl Restaurant & Oyster Bar, an uncommonly fine Asian-fusion place incongruously located in a strip mall, followed by the Peterborough Players' splendid revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner (about which more here). Spent the night at the Benjamin Prescott Inn, built in 1853, whose proprietors are as nice as can be.

• AUGUST 3 To Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there to spend two days seeing the Seacoast Repertory Theatre's productions of Damn Yankees and West Side Story (about which more here and here). Dinner at Pesce Blue, recommended by the authors of Fodor's New England, who nailed it in one. My seafood risotto was meltingly good.

• AUGUST 5 To Colby College in Waterville, Maine, alma mater of Linda Greenlaw, whose museum contains major collections of works by John Marin and Alex Katz, both prominently represented in the Teachout Museum. I went there on my first visit to Maine four years ago and have been dying to return ever since. The Marin galleries house the best selection of that great American artist's work to be seen in any museum, not excluding my beloved Phillips Collection.

Next stop: Maine's Blue Hill Peninsula, there to spend the night at the Oakland House Seaside Inn, whose accommodations include an 1907 arts-and-crafts-style cottage with a gazebo on the water. I passed the afternoon in a rocking chair on the porch, lapping up the salt air and reading a moldering copy of Good Evening, Everybody, the autobiography of Lowell Thomas, which I found on a bookshelf in the cottage library, tucked away among the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

Most people remember Thomas--if at all--as the mellifluous voice of Twentieth Century Fox's Movietone newsreels and the man who "discovered" T.E. Lawrence. (Arthur Kennedy played him in Lawrence of Arabia.) In my parents' day, though, he was also America's best-known and best-loved radio newscaster. Lowell Thomas and the News went on the air in 1930 and ran until 1976, long enough for me to tune in his farewell broadcast. Thomas grew up in Cripple Creek, Colorado, the wildest of the gold-rush towns, and lived to tell his dwindling band of aging listeners about Watergate. Now, like the rest of the stars of golden-age network radio, he is forgotten save by nostalgia-crazed old-time radio buffs. Sic transit gloria mundi!

(To be continued)

Posted August 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Reminder

My recent appearance on XM Satellite Radio's Downstage Center, the weekly program of the American Theatre Wing, is now archived on the ATW's Web site. To listen in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player, go here.

Howard Sherman, co-host of Downstage Center, wrote the other day to point out some things about the show that I hadn't realized:

So far as we know, Downstage Center is the only national, weekly radio program featuring sustained conversation about theatre, covering Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional work; commercial and not-for-profit; musicals and plays; and speaking not only with actors, writers and directors, but artistic directors, designers, producers and on occasion, critics (there are a bunch of shows about musicals on both broadcast and terrestrial radio, as well as podcasts). Your interview was our 165th since the show began in April 2004, without a single repeated guest, and every one is available online for free as streaming audio and podcast.

All the more reason to listen, either via the ATW archives or by subscribing to XM, of which I am a very big fan. You can do the latter by going here.

Posted August 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Fame is a bee.
It has a song--
It has a sting--
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Emily Dickinson, "Fame Is a Bee"

Posted August 27, 12:00 AM

August 24, 2007

TT: Last-minute save

Apropos of yesterday's reflections on F. Scott Fitzgerald, a friend writes:

I have read Great Gatsby three times and still can't feel why it slays people. In some funny way I think it is a guy book not a girl book. (I like Tender best.) But Fitz's life--that moves me! He had the guts to face his deterioration and write about it; to the end of his life he remained kind to other writers, and generous even to pricks like Hemingway; his naked admiration for their work and his appreciation for what it took from them to produce it; his never joining an ideological tong to protect his reputation, his never going left; his saying 'life is a cheat and the conditions are those of defeat and the only thing that stands and redeems is work' ; his love for the Murphys, for every excellent character he met; his admission of his failures; his attempt to make it work in hollywood; his note taking on thalberg; his brave open heart. I know he was an ass, but he was a wonderful endearing ass and in the end his life really did have some epic grandeur. I just had to hold high the Stand Up for Scott Fitzgerald banner today.

I love this, and sort of agree (except about Gatsby!). The very last act of Fitzgerald's life was edifying, and I hadn't finished reading Matthew Bruccoli's biography when I wrote that posting. But boy, did it take him a long, squalid, pathetic time to get there....

Posted August 24, 11:18 AM

TT: She's the one that you'll want

I was back in New York last week, shuttling between Broadway and Central Park to see Grease and A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Kathleen Marshall needs no gimmicks to make a show a hit. Her revivals of "Wonderful Town" and "The Pajama Game" put her solidly in the running for the title of Broadway's hottest choreographer-director. Why, then, did she sign up to stage the Broadway revival of "Grease" mounted by the creators of "You're the One That I Want," the snooze-inducing reality-TV series that let its viewers choose the leads of this production? M-O-N-E-Y, I assume. Nevertheless, I'm pleased (and relieved) to report that Ms. Marshall has emptied her bag of theatrical tricks onto the stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. "Grease" may not be much of a show, but this revival is still fun to see--in spite of the limitations of one of its audience-anointed stars....

It takes a scene or two for Daniel Sullivan's Shakespeare in the Park production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to get off the mark. But once it starts moving, it quickly picks up comic speed and turns into a show that's very much worth seeing....

Three members of the cast give performances deserving of special mention. Martha Plimpton, lately of "The Coast of Utopia," is commandingly hot-blooded as Helena, the spurned lover. Laila Robins, who made a powerful impression on me three years ago in Bryony Lavery's "Frozen," gives a breathtakingly sensual performance as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. As for Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who played the hapless Leaf Coneybear in the original production of "The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee," he's been cast as Flute, the cross-dressing member of the rude mechanicals, in which capacity he brings off the near-unprecedented feat of stealing the show from Bottom....

No free link. Go thou and do what you gotta do, preferably by going here to subscribe to the Online Journal. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted August 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I hold springtime in my arms, the fullness of it and the rinsing sadness of it."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted August 24, 12:00 AM

August 23, 2007

OGIC: The epicure's howl

Late in Kate Christensen's deceptively wicked novel The Epicure's Lament, the Jernigan Memorial Psychiatric Hospital makes a telling appearance. But by the time the reference turns up, Christensen's debt to David Gates's bleaker 1991 novel has proven more cosmetic than substantive. The antihero of her novel, Hugo Whittier, may be dying a painful death, but for bitter, black misanthropy he ultimately has nothing on Gates's physically healthy but spiritually stunted David Jernigan. On the surface Christensen's novel is all sharpened elbows and bared cuspids, but ultimately these outward edges are covering for a reasonably soft heart.

Christensen's novel takes the acerbic form of four of Hugo's notebooks, kept during the last year of his illness with Buerger's disease, a circulatory condition usually caused by heavy tobacco use. Indeed, the forty-year-old Hugo is hopelessly addicted to smoking--as well as to good food, casual sex, and as much distance as he can place between himself and the fellow humans whose less refined ways so offend his sensibilities. Heir to a very good deal of very old money, Hugo has led his life free of financial constraint but ever oppressed by the poisonous aftertaste of his widowed mother's unnatural attachment to and queasy demands on him as a boy.

As an adult, Hugo dissembles. He lies to the people in his life, and he lies to us, the readers of his notebooks, too--for instance, he doesn't despise those people in his life nearly as much as he'd like us to think. His disavowed compassion shows itself now and again, like the lowered hem of a slip. The moments when it does make the novel's ultimate softening not as much of a stretch as it might have been; and their unexpectedness along the way, along with Hugo's own abashed surprise at them, makes them genuinely moving.

(The question of what Hugo would like "us" to think, incidentally, raised another interesting question I ask myself a lot: just who do we think we are writing for when we keep a notebook, diary, or journal? Like most of us who keep these kinds of private records, Hugo through most of the novel wants and doesn't want an audience. By the last pages, however, you feel that he has wanted one earnestly and that his being read has saved him, in more than just the most obvious way. It made me wonder about my own ambivalence between the wish for privacy and the wish for a reader, and made me see, for an instant, even the most secretive journal-keeping as a furtive plea to be read, to be understood--just maybe to be saved.)

I'm a bit behind the curve, obviously, on my Christensen reading. Her new novel, out only about a week, is the talk of the web, even garnering a glowing notice from my co-blogger (see the Top Five, to the right). As The Epicure's Lament was compulsively readable and nearly single-handedly roused me from a summer-long reading funk, I don't think The Great Man will be far behind on my reading list.

Up first, though: This Side of Paradise and Lost Illusions.

Posted August 23, 12:01 AM

CAAF: 5x5 Books with Elderly Protagonists by Matthew Sharpe

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week's installment comes from Matthew Sharpe, whose perverse and wonderful novel Jamestown is the Lit Blog Co-op's Read This! Selection for summer. Join the LBC discussion of the novel happening this week, which features a podcast, entries from Sharpe and Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, and other shenanigans.

When I think of the novel as it blossomed in the nineteenth century, I tend to think of plucky, independent-minded young men and women who, despite a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, succeed in marrying above their station in the closing pages; or, alternatively, languid, morbid-minded young men and women who, succumbing to a series of insurmountable obstacles, succeed in being crushed to death by love or fate in the closing pages. But defying this identification of novels with youth are what I like to call geezer novels, a sub-genre wherein the protagonists are old, or nearly so, and the adventures that befall them therefore all that much more surprising. So here is my mini-celebration of five geezer novels, in alphabetical order by author, more or less.

1. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This fantastical novel whose author is probably better known as a painter concerns a 90-year-old woman whose family cannot distinguish between her, a rooster, and a cactus. She dies and comes back... as a 90-year-old woman.

2. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Whose protagonist is the OG (Original Geezer).

3. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso. My fellow Soft Skull author's novel is wise and beautifully written and its protagonist, being an unfrozen dinosaur, is way older than any of the others on this list.

4. All the Names by Jose Saramago. An epic journey undertaken by a lowly late-middle-aged filing clerk in an unnamed European city that may be the same one where Kafka's The Trial takes place.

5. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett. "...waiting for the joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy."

Posted August 23, 12:01 AM

CAAF: Clams on the half shell and roller skates, roller skates.

I've been working like a fiend all week in anticipation of a trip to Martha's Vineyard this weekend with my friends Hortense and Boozy (who live in New York). Although, I'll admit, the furious pace of this work flow may have been compromised by my trotting to the bathroom every ten minutes to see if my Dr. Denese self-tanner had taken effect. It (the self-tanner) did eventually kick in, and I now emanate a lustrous St. Tropez glow, especially if viewed at night, in a well-curtained room, illumined by the benevolent light of a lone flickering candle. Alas, in direct sunlight the effect is somewhat diminished. In short: If you're in Martha's Vineyard this weekend, and you spot a woman whose unevenly streaked skin suggests recreational hours spent rolling joyfully in a basin of coffee grounds, I hope you'll say hello.

Still: the beach, ocean! Gin! Our trio's required reading for the trip is Joan Aiken's Nightbirds of Nantucket (a Dido Twite special), with additional reading on the subjects of whaling, cannibalism and tragic shipwreck strongly encouraged. I have Moby Dick packed (my second trip through), along with Kate Christensen's Great Man (see Terry's recommendation in the Top Five at right) and Northanger Abbey, for a bit of Gothic before bedtime.

I'm not taking my laptop, so not a peep from me till Tuesday. See you then!

Posted August 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Latin(o) Mass

I went to hear Osvaldo Golijov's Pasión según San Marcos at the Mostly Mozart Festival last Sunday night. Allan Kozinn's New York Times review describes it accurately, if coolly. My Washington Post review of the 2002 New York premiere, by contrast, is stronger on enthusiasm than detail:

As for the New York premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's "Pasión según San Marcos" at the BAM Opera House in Brooklyn, well, I'd have flown back from Tierra del Fuego on a two-seater to hear it, in part because I'd heard so much about it. No recent piece of classical music has been talked up more enthusiastically than this singularly ambitious setting of the Passion According to St. Mark. Not having been able to get up to Tanglewood last spring to check it out, I was eager to confirm or refute the fast-building buzz.

Guess what? It's all true. Golijov's St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a black gospel choir--you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he's about.

At the heart of the piece are two sharply contrasted female vocal soloists, and though it was Dawn Upshaw who had the most memorable aria, the elegant "Colorless Moon," Luciana Souza stole the show anyway. Souza (pronounced SOH-za), a Brazilian jazz singer based in New York, has been mentioned in this space fairly frequently in the past year (Brazilian Duos, her latest CD, is my favorite vocal album of 2002), but this was the first time I had heard her other than in a club, and I was floored by the high drama of her singing. A slight woman dressed in a simple white shift and slippers, she looked and sounded ten feet tall: wild, charismatic, totally present. Even among jazz buffs, Souza is not yet widely known, but I left the theater sure that she is going to become a very bright star.

My hunch is that the same thing will happen to Osvaldo Golijov. The St. Mark Passion, mind you, is not without flaws. It's a bit harmonically static and somewhat repetitive, and the over-miked Brooklyn Philharmonic failed to make the most of the string writing, though Robert Spano conducted the orchestra to within an inch of its life. Still, these are the merest quibbles over a piece whose total effect is roughly similar to the sensation of being knocked down by a tornado. It's as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously--which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece. Take note, Kennedy Center: This is a work you need to be presenting right away.

I've gone on a bit about Golijov's St. Mark Passion because--well, just because I wanted to. For me, it was the major event of the year to date....

The St. Mark Passion has been recorded, but I didn't listen to it again until last Sunday, partly because I was less impressed by the other works of Golijov that I'd heard in the meantime. I wondered whether I'd been bowled over by its sheer shock effect, and was more than a little bit skeptical about how it would strike me the second time around. I admitted as much to Alex Ross, who replied, "It will be interesting to see what you think of the Golijov encore. Listening again last summer (or was it the summer before) I found it less wild and festive, more of a serious, coherent, cannily controlled composition (possibly the result of Spano's own control of the material). In all, I admired it even more."

In fact I felt pretty much the same way about the St. Mark Passion on Sunday that I did in 2002. I still find it harmonically static--which is the main problem I have with Golijov's other music--but the extraordinary textural variety makes up for the lack of strong tonal movement, and the overall effect of the piece is still pretty damned overwhelming, all the more so because I have an ingrained suspicion of the kind of flamboyant excess to which Golijov is inclined. Alex was right, though: a second hearing of the St. Mark Passion suggested to me as well that it is a much tighter, more precisely calculated piece of work than I'd realized.

As for Luciana Souza, I'm pleased and proud to say that I've been in her corner ever since I first heard Brazilian Duos late in 2001. My 2002 New York Times profile subsequently helped to put her in the spotlight, and what I said about her in my Post review of the St. Mark Passion, which came out a couple of months after the Times piece, has since been borne out in spades.

A good day's work, in short. It's gratifying to look back on an old review and know that you got it on the nose.

Posted August 23, 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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

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

Posted August 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."

Brad Bird, screenplay for Ratatouille

Posted August 23, 12:00 AM

August 22, 2007

MOVIE

Sunshine. Its influences are myriad and apparent--from Tarkovsky to Kubrick to Ridley Scott--but Danny Boyle's space-set thriller synthesizes them deftly and adds enough inventions of its own to carve out a distinctive aesthetic. Of all the destinations cinematic space voyagers have set their sights on, the sun has to be the one with the most raw power to exhilarate the imagination; Sunshine has visual potency to match (OGIC).

Posted August 22, 10:38 PM

OGIC: Against "deceptively"

I've always wondered about the correct usage of this word, and no wonder:

§ 90. deceptively
Would you dive into a pool that is deceptively shallow? The question gives one pause. When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Is the pool shallower or deeper than it appears to be? We asked the Usage Panel to decide. Fifty percent thought the pool is shallower than it appears. Thirty-two percent thought the pool deeper than it appears. And 18 percent said it was impossible to decide. Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended. When using deceptively with an adjective, be sure the context leaves no room for doubt. An easy way to remedy the situation is to rewrite the sentence without deceptively: The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.

Per The American Heritage Book of English Usage. My Fowler's (second edition) is silent on the matter.

Posted August 22, 12:32 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• I've been reading the second revised edition of Matthew J. Bruccoli's Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a very solid piece of work which I skimmed inattentively not long after its original publication in 1981. I admire Fitzgerald's best work without reservation--I consider The Great Gatsby the great American novel--but I can't think of another major writer who led a less edifying life. The story of Fitzgerald's drunken slide into artistic inertia is so pathetic that it's hard to take, and the more you read, the more depressed you get.

Speaking as a biographer, it's interesting to compare the problems Bruccoli faced in writing Some Sort of Epic Grandeur with the ones I face in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Indeed, I'm not at all sure that the word "problem" applies in my case. Armstrong was born into desperate poverty, pulled himself out of the gutter via a combination of genius and iron determination, and eventually became a celebrity who was loved by everyone who knew him. His life became less dramatic as he grew older, but it remained eventful, and when he died, Duke Ellington pronounced the perfect epitaph: "He was born poor, died rich, and didn't hurt anyone along the way." In short, you couldn't ask for a better biographical subject, and insofar as any such book can properly be said to be easy to write, Hotter Than That qualifies.

One of the characters in Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution is a cheerfully disillusioned European émigré composer named Gottfried Rosenbaum whose duties as a professor of music at Benton College include composing scores for the modern dances of the school's resident choreographer, a gym-teacher-turned-Martha-Graham-clone whose efforts are a trifle short on angst. These Rosenbaum knocks off in a maximum of fifteen minutes apiece, explaining, "Ven idt take more dan fifteen minutes, zell me down the river."

That's sort of how I feel about writing the life of Satchmo: if you can't write a good book about a man like that, you can't write.

• In my last "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about my love for midcentury modern domestic architecture, which many readers of this blog do not share:

What is it about midcentury modernism that gets under so many people's skins? In May I toured Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, a glass-walled weekend retreat tucked away in a leafy corner of rural Illinois. Built in 1951, the Farnsworth House is beloved of architects and art critics the world over. It is entrancingly beautiful--but its transparent walls are cruelly unforgiving of the clutter of everyday life. Franz Schulze, Mies' admiring biographer, admitted that it is "more nearly a temple than a dwelling." I'm unusually neat and so could (just) imagine living there, but Edith Farnsworth, the house's original owner, came to loathe its lack of privacy, ruefully admitting that it made her uncomfortable to see so much as a single coathanger out of place.

That's what's wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live instead of helping you live the way you want. But even those modern architects who were sensitive to the needs of their clients often failed to please the public at large. In her brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, America's greatest architect, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Journal's architecture critic, pointed out that his houses "never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal." Yet their distinctive style failed to catch on with ordinary home-buyers, and you can drive for hundreds of miles throughout America without seeing a single Wright-like house by the side of the road....

I got two funny letters from friends in response to this column.

One was from Florida:

I just read your article about 50s modern architecture. Boy, that woman was right. It is maddening to live in a house like that. We're renting a place here in Tallahassee that's 50s modern and I have to fight the urge to throw away everything we own and buy chrome furniture. Also--there are pocket doors all over the place and sliding cabinet doors, sliding glass doors--all over 50 years old and all off their tracks & nearly impossible to use. I'll have to send you some pix...but of course, these houses look awful when someone actually LIVES in them, so I'll have to tidy up first!! I think if I were super-rich, I'd buy a place like this just to throw cocktail parties in. That's what they were built for, I think. At night, you get the feeling you're being watched because of all the huge windows. Weird.

I've since seen the pictures, and I confess that I would kill to live in that house, sticky pocket doors notwithstanding.

The other letter was from Manhattan:

Professor Donald Fleming, who looked like a bald friendly turtle peering myopically over the lecturn, said to us undergrads in his course on American intellectual history: "The thing...about...Frank Lloyd Wright's houses is...that...you can't have sex in them."

Alas, I must stand mute.

• Incidentally, I'm told that the photo of the Farnsworth House that ran with my column in the print edition of last Saturday's Journal was captioned "Gropius House." Or maybe it was the other way round. I don't read the Journal on paper--I'm an Online Journal man--nor do I choose the art for my columns, so this was news to me. At least one blogger has already hastened to blame me for the blunder, though, accusing me of first-degree aesthetic stupidity. Not guilty!

• Speaking of elective mutism, I got stuck on the phone the other day with a fast, uncontrollably verbose talker. I'm a pretty good talker myself, but I couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise with a blunderbuss had I cared to do so. Fortunately, he was (mostly) telling me things I wanted to know, but listening to him was like standing in front of a fire hose. Are such compulsive monologuists aware of the impression they make? I doubt it. For that matter, I doubt they're aware of much of anything.

Neville Cardus, the English music critic about whom I'll be writing in Commentary later this year, was a notoriously one-sided conversationalist, but Christopher Brookes, his biographer, tells a funny story of the day that Cardus met his match:

One of his favorite conversational adversaries was John Barbirolli. As well as being close friends, they were both great actors and each enjoyed upstaging the other "for the greater glory of God." At one of their lunchtime meetings, true to form both spent the first hour talking sixteen to the dozen without taking the slightest notice of what the other might have been saying. The occupant of a nearby table recalled that to his surprise and admiration at one point in this exchange Sir John took out his false teeth but still kept talking. By this time Neville was of course a master of the art of masticating and conversing simultaneously....

I know very well that I talk too damn much, and I hate myself for it, but I don't think I've ever gotten wound up that far.

Posted August 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it."

Jay Rosen, "Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press" (PressThink, Aug. 14, 2007)

Posted August 22, 12:00 AM

August 21, 2007

TT: As others see us

Howard Sherman, who interviewed me day before yesterday for the American Theatre Wing's weekly radio broadcast, has blogged about the experience:

I haven't done p.r. for some 14 years now, my personal knowledge of those who populate the critical field is rather less current, and while I remain an avid reader of all theatre journalism, I don't know the writers themselves as I once did. Of course, the public rarely gets to know any of these folks personally, and only the astute readers who check bylines really develop a sense of the author's voice--and personality--through their reviews.

So when I had the opportunity to meet Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, while taping a Downstage Center program, it was my first opportunity in years to meet a critic after knowing him only through his writing. In the course of the conversation, we spoke about this issue, and Terry commented that he feels people can get to know him from his reviews alone (although he blogs constantly), because he writes the same way he talks. And after an hour with him, I can say that his self-assessment is correct: the man I met is the man I've been reading for four years.

But even more striking, after years of knowing and reading dozens of theatre critics: he's the exception more than the rule. The personal conversations I have with critics about shows and issues often seem quite different than when I read about those same shows and topics in print.

I am too close to this issue to have any genuine perspective, but I do wonder which is more useful to those who read and follow reviews: do they want "the critical voice" or "the personal voice," or are they always one and the same?

I wonder, too.

Posted August 21, 10:36 PM

TT: You meet the nicest people

The original author of my Wikipedia entry wrote today to warn me that some nameless clod had vandalized it over the weekend (he kindly fixed it for me). I guess I asked for it, but I'm still impressed--if that's the word--by the way in which the Internet facilitates idiocy. Or, in the words of an unknown commenter quoted in Daniel J. Solove's forthcoming book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, "The Internet makes fools into stars and stars into fools."

Needless to say, the latter isn't always a bad thing....

Posted August 21, 12:09 AM

TT: Words to the wise

• Luciana Souza is singing at the Jazz Standard on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The band consists of Edward Simon, Larry Koonse, Scott Colley, and Antonio Sanchez--the same group heard on her new album, The New Bossa Nova--with tenor saxophonist Chris Potter sitting in on Friday. Two sets each night, at 7:30 and 9:30. Reserve early--this one will sell out. (I'm going on Friday, so look for me at the first set.)

For more information, go here and scroll down.

• I'm the guest on this week's episode of Downstage Center, the satellite radio program of the American Theatre Wing, the organization that (among other things) runs the Tony Awards. Howard Sherman and John von Soosten, the hosts, interviewed me about my work as the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, as well as about The Letter, the opera I'm writing with Paul Moravec. The hour-long conversation, which was taped on Monday afternoon, was unusually detailed and wide-ranging, and I think it will make for good listening.

XM Satellite Radio's Channel 28, On Broadway, airs Downstage Center on Fridays at six p.m., Saturdays at noon, and Sundays at seven p.m. (all times are EDT). Next Monday my interview will be archived on the American Theatre Wing's Web site, where you can listen to it in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player by going here.

You can also subscribe to the podcast version of Downstage Center by going to iTunes and searching for "American Theatre Wing."

Happy listening!

Posted August 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted August 21, 12:00 AM

August 20, 2007

TT: Not to put too fine a point on it

James Wolcott didn't like Mozart Dances, or what I wrote about it. I think he has a tin eye and a sour puss. De gustibus!

Posted August 20, 10:08 PM

CAAF: "Watson, I'm afraid I've come down with a terrible case of the Mondays."

At the library last week I picked up the first volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I've read many of the mysteries before ("The Red-Headed League" was a particular favorite when I was a kid) but never the first one, A Study in Scarlet (published 1887), in which Watson and Holmes meet for the first time and arrange to set up digs together on Baker Street.

In that first interview, Holmes warns Watson "I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days at times." Am I the only one who thought "being in the dumps" was a modern construction? (Linked to town dumps, junkyard dogs, being put to the curb, etc.) It is not. A friend with a copy of the OED was kind enough to send along the appropriate dictionary entry -- forthwith, the three definitions of "in the dumps" with their earliest usages:

1. A fit of abstraction or musing, a reverie; a dazed or puzzled state, a maze; perplexity, amazement; absence of mind. 1523 Skelton Garl. Laurell 14 So depely drownyd I was in this dumpe, encraumpyshed so sore was my conceyte, That, me to rest, I lent me to a stumpe of an oke.

2. A fit of melancholy or depression; now only in pl. (colloq. and more or less humorous): Heaviness of mind, dejection, low spirits.
1529 More Comf. agst. Trib. i. Wks. 1140/2 What heapes of heauynesse, hathe of late fallen amonge vs alreadye, with whiche some of our poore familye bee fallen into suche dumpes.

3. A mournful or plaintive melody or song; also, by extension, a tune in general; sometimes app. used for a kind of dance.
1553 Udall Royster D. ii. i. (Arb.) 32 Then twang with our sonets, and twang with our dumps, And heyhough from our heart, as heauie as lead lumpes.

Posted August 20, 12:16 PM

TT and OGIC: Three's company

Sharp-eyed readers may already have noticed a small but significant change in the top module of the right-hand column (a similar change to the masthead is in the works). It's no accident. As of today, litblogger Carrie Frye, who joined us last month as a guest blogger, comes aboard permanently as the third member of the "About Last Night" team. We couldn't be happier--and judging by the upward bounce in our readership stats that occurred when Carrie first started blogging with us, our guess is that you feel the same way. She's a good friend, a good colleague, and more fun than a megawatt zap to the nucleus accumbens. We're glad she's decided to let us make an honest woman of her.

For those readers who haven't yet gotten the message, the three of us sign the headlines of our individual postings as follows:

• Terry is "TT"

• Our Girl in Chicago (also known as Laura Demanski) is "OGIC"

• Carrie is "CAAF"

Welcome to the club, CAAF--and be sure to keep that secret handshake to yourself.

Posted August 20, 1:00 AM

TT: Enough said

I am, as those who know me are well aware, something of a child at heart. Not surprisingly, then, it pleased me no end when I took my seat in the first ring of Lincoln Center's New York State Theater last Thursday night and saw that I was surrounded by TV cameras. To be sure, none of them was pointed at me--they were there to telecast Mark Morris' Mozart Dances on PBS' Live From Lincoln Center--but even so, I got a huge kick out of the fact that they were an arm's length from my aisle seat.

"My sister in St. Louis is watching tonight," my companion for the evening whispered as the lights went down. I liked that, too, just as I liked knowing that some of you would be seeing what I was seeing at the very moment I saw it. I recently blogged about what it feels like to listen to a live album at whose creation you were present. Being in the audience for a live telecast is even more exciting, in part because of the strong sense of community that such an experience creates.

Experiences like these are growing rarer. As I wrote in A Terry Teachout Reader:

The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each "narrowcasting" to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as today's corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of "lifestyle clusters" whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.

In many ways this new regime is a good thing, even a blessing, but it also takes away the feeling of shared experience that I felt when I watched TV as a boy, knowing that most of the people I knew--as well as millions of people I didn't know--were watching the same shows at the same time. The movie My Favorite Year, whose climactic scene is a portrayal of a live broadcast of a fictional Fifties TV program not unlike Your Show of Shows, conveys something of that feeling, as does the surviving kinescope of the original 1953 telecast of Marty that I saw earlier this year. That's what I felt last Thursday, and I loved it.

As for Mozart Dances, I could go on and on about its myriad beauties...but I prefer not to. Mind you, I have no doubt that it is a masterpiece, just as I was sure that Morris' V was a masterpiece when I saw it for the first time in 2001, and if you pressed me I could easily come up with a lengthy and persuasive explanation of why this should be so. It is, after all, my job to explain the ineffable, though plotless dances are peculiarly resistant to such explanations. ("We dare to go into the world where there are no names for anything," George Balanchine once remarked to Jerome Robbins.) On the other hand, I wasn't on the job last Thursday: I was there to enjoy myself, and I didn't take any notes. Instead I let Mozart Dances happen to me, and when it was over I felt as though I'd come back home from a trip to Eden.

One thing I will say is that this was one of the few times in my life that I've been fortunate enough to see a great dance accompanied by world-class musicians. It's no secret (save to certain tin-eared dance critics) that the New York City Ballet pit orchestra is usually pretty awful, but the unhappy fact is that the vast majority of dance performances in America are accompanied either by second-rate players or by taped music, which is even worse. On Thursday night, by contrast, we got to hear Emanuel Ax, Yoko Nozaki, Louis Langrée, and the Mostly Mozart orchestra perform two Mozart piano concertos (K. 413 and 595) and the Two-Piano Sonata. At intermission I ran into Patrick J. Smith, who knows more about opera than anybody, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Finally--finally--the music is as good as the dancing!" And so it was.

Just before the curtain went up, Mark Morris slipped into the aisle seat across from me, which added an extra frisson to the proceedings. I know Mark a bit--we spent a couple of hours talking over The Letter back in January--and I've liked him ever since our first meeting, when he naughtily introduced me to the members of his company as "M'sieur Tee-Shew." He is, among other things, funny and frank to a degree that can sometimes be unnerving but is more often exhilarating, and I've never spoken to him without going away happy. Yet there is always a moment when it suddenly hits me that I'm talking to the choreographer of L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which has a way of putting a damper on the conversation.

I've known four people in my lifetime--maybe five--whom I believe to be creative geniuses, and Mark is one of them. To be in the company of such birds of paradise is inevitably to be reminded of your own limitations. They are not as other men. So I didn't say much to him at intermission: I simply said hello and told him I thought Mozart Dances was wonderful, and left it at that. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Posted August 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Listen to me! Listen to me!

My recent appearance on XM Satellite Radio's Downstage Center, the weekly program of the American Theatre Wing, will be archived today on the ATW's Web site. To listen in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player, go here.

Howard Sherman, co-host of Downstage Center, wrote the other day to point out some things about the show that I hadn't realized:

So far as we know, Downstage Center is the only national, weekly radio program featuring sustained conversation about theatre, covering Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional work; commercial and not-for-profit; musicals and plays; and speaking not only with actors, writers and directors, but artistic directors, designers, producers and on occasion, critics (there are a bunch of shows about musicals on both broadcast and terrestrial radio, as well as podcasts). Your interview was our 165th since the show began in April 2004, without a single repeated guest, and every one is available online for free as streaming audio and podcast.

All the more reason to listen, either via the ATW archives or by subscribing to XM, of which I am a very big fan. You can do the latter by going here.

Posted August 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Posted August 20, 12:00 AM

August 17, 2007

TT: Just in case you were wondering

I gather from a number of recent news stories that it's considered bad form to edit your own Wikipedia entry. As far as I'm concerned, that's hogwash. Ever since I noticed that people in search of biographical information about me were cribbing it from my entry, I edited it carefully, started watching it like a hawk, and have continued to update it regularly. I didn't write the original entry, however, and have done my best to ensure that its tone remains neutral and purely informational (except for the last sentence of the second paragraph, which is the work of the original author!).

Earlier today a radio host on whose show I'll be appearing next week--watch this space for details--asked me to send him my bio.

"I'd be glad to," I said, "but you can just check my Wikipedia entry."

"Those things aren't very trustworthy, are they?" he asked.

"This one is," I replied grimly.

Posted August 17, 7:33 PM

TT: Jerry's kids

One more from the road: my Wall Street Journal drama column is about two regional-theater musical revivals that make use of Jerome Robbins' original choreography.

From New Hampshire, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre's West Side Story:

Of all Robbins' shows, "West Side Story," in which the plot of "Romeo and Juliet" is transplanted to a New York slum circa 1957, is hardest to revive without his choreography. To be sure, it can be done--Joel Ferrell re-choreographed the show to fine effect for Portland Center Stage last year--but to do so is inevitably to invite comparison with the finger-popping dances that made it into the 1961 film version and so became familiar to millions of moviegoers who would never see "West Side Story" on stage. For most of us, these vaulting, vibrant sketches of teenage passion are as much a part of "West Side Story" as Leonard Bernstein's jazzy score, and any director who omits them does so at his own risk.

Brian Swasey, the man at the helm of the Seacoast Repertory Theatre's revival of "West Side Story," has opted for modesty over daring. "Who am I to think I can create something better than Jerome Robbins?" he writes in his program note. I admire his good sense--and I also admire the way in which he has managed to cram Robbins' dances into a downstairs theater whose stage isn't much larger than my Manhattan living room. My third-row seat was no more than 10 feet from the action. To see "West Side Story" in so intimate a setting is viscerally thrilling in a way that no big-house performance can possibly hope to rival....

From Maine, the Ogunquit Playhouse's King and I:

Steven Yuhasz directed the revival of "The King and I" now playing at Maine's Ogunquit Playhouse, a 75-year-old purveyor of resort-town musical comedy that bills itself as "Broadway on the Beach." He has wisely chosen to stick with the original choreography, and Susan Kikuchi's (mostly) faithful recreation of Robbins' Thai-style dance-and-mime version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is one of the production's highlights. The dancing isn't up to Broadway standards, but Robbins' conception is so strong and vivid that it needn't be executed perfectly in order to be perfectly charming....

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

Posted August 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Make mine midcentury modern

I recently paid a visit to the Gropius House, not far from Walden Pond, which Walter Gropius designed for himself in 1938. Touring this remarkable house a few months after seeing Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House for the first time caused me to start thinking about why so many Americans dislike midcentury modern architecture--even though they respond enthusiastically to other forms of modern art. The end product of these speculations was my next "Sightings" column, which will appear in the "Pursuits" section of Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Regardless of how you feel about midcentury modernism, I think you'll find it interesting.

Pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and give it a read.

Posted August 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• I usually sleep deeply and well, and so tend not to remember my dreams. On the rare occasions when I do recall them after waking, they're almost always commonplace, nothing like the elaborate doozies that some of my friends regularly bring back from the Land of Nod. Every once in a while, though, I manage to eke out something interesting. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I dreamed that I sat in with Louis Armstrong (we played "Mack the Knife," and the piano player was rushing). He was performing in the large, anonymous-looking waiting room of a hospital located on a hill, and when I awoke I realized with a start that it was Cape Girardeau's Southeast Missouri Hospital, the place where I was born. Pretty good for an Armstrong biographer, huh?

Last night's dream was similarly exotic, as well as similarly related to my childhood. I dreamed that the studio of Helen Frankenthaler (whose Grey Fireworks is part of the Teachout Museum) was located in the basement of my mother's home in Smalltown, U.S.A., the house where I grew up. My mother, it seemed, had somehow neglected to share this fact with me--apparently she didn't find it unusual enough to mention--and I only happened to discover it when I went downstairs during a visit and found a tall stack of unfinished canvases next to the water heater.

After I woke up, I realized that the woman who played Frankenthaler in my dream was Illeana Douglas, who had a nice little role in Ghost World but whom I haven't seen on screen for a number of years. (That's pretty good casting, actually.)

As usual, the part of the puzzled middle-aged dreamer was played by me.

• Max Roach is dead. He was a great and influential jazz drummer, one of the very best who ever lived, though I can't say that he was one of my personal favorites--I always found his sound to be flat and grey. Still, he made far more than his share of memorable recordings, of which Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, a 1956 album to which I return at least once a year, shows him off to particularly good effect. His solo on "Blue Seven" (which exists in notation in the second volume of Burt Korall's Drummin' Men) is a classic by any reckoning, mine included.

Mr. JazzWax pays a heartfelt and intelligent tribute to Roach here.

Posted August 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

Robert Towne, screenplay for Chinatown (spoken by John Huston)

Posted August 17, 12:00 AM

August 16, 2007

TT: Second sight

I just got back from watching Mark Morris' Mozart Dances at Lincoln Center. I'll write about it on Monday--right now all I feel like doing is sitting down and vibrating a little longer--but I do want to advise those of you who weren't able to see tonight's Live From Lincoln Center telecast that some PBS affiliates will be showing Mozart Dances again later in the week. In New York City, for instance, it will be rebroadcast this coming Sunday at noon on Channel 13.

For more information, go here.

Posted August 16, 10:11 PM

TT: Words to the wise

• The Mostly Mozart Festival has gotten interesting after an alarmingly long stretch of being otherwise. (See Alex Ross' latest New Yorker essay for a trenchant explanation of what happened and why.) If you want to see for yourself--and you should--Mark Morris' Mozart Dances will be telecast live from Lincoln Center's New York State Theater tonight on PBS. It's a full-evening Morris ballet set to a pair of piano concertos and the Two-Piano Sonata. The performers include the Mark Morris Dance Group, the pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.

The curtain goes up at eight p.m. EDT. Go here for more details. I'll be there--look for me in the crowd shots!

If you want to experience Mozart Dances in person, it will also be performed on Friday and Saturday nights. For more information, go here.

• Also on this week's Mostly Mozart bill are two performances of Osvaldo Golijov's Pasión según San Marcos, which I heard for the first time in 2002 and wrote about in a Washington Post "Second City" column:

Golijov's St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a gospel choir--you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he's about...It's as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously--which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece.

I haven't listened to the Pasión since its New York premiere and am hugely curious to see how it's aged, so I'm going back to hear it again. Two performances, on Saturday at eight p.m. and Sunday at five p.m., both at the Rose Theater. (I'll be there on Sunday.) The performers include Luciana Souza, who should need no introduction to the readers of this blog.

For more information, go here.

• Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory closes on Sunday, alas. Here's my Wall Street Journal review in its entirety:

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 simpleminded 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. The Roundabout Theatre Company has done a great thing by bringing Beyond Glory to New York for a two-month run. This is acting of the highest imaginable quality, a performance that will sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after.

Go here for more information.

Posted August 16, 8:58 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)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee * (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here)
• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted August 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism."

Robert Novak, The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington

Posted August 16, 12:00 AM

August 15, 2007

TT: Wouldja for a big red apple?

New York City looked joltingly unfamiliar to me as I rode home from Penn Station after a month in rural New England. The fierce morning sunshine made everything seem unreal. Too many hard-faced pedestrians jammed the sidewalks, and too many cars raced up and down the crowded streets. The first thing I noticed upon reaching my Upper West Side neighborhood was that the diner where I'd lunched the day before leaving town had closed its doors permanently in my absence. I spent the whole afternoon sifting through the piles of mail with which my kitchen table was covered. At one point I snuck a furtive peek at my calendar, saw that I was booked solid through next Monday, and sighed deeply. Life in Manhattan can be hard to take, especially when you've just spent a month in the country.

Aldous Huxley speaks somewhere of "the blessedness at the heart of things." It's all too easy to lose sight of that blessedness on a hot summer day in New York, and I admit to having briefly questioned its existence yesterday afternoon. But I have more reasons than most to count my blessings, and the events that followed recalled them to me forcibly.

At day's end I walked to Central Park West, met a waiting friend, and strolled with her to the outdoor stage where Fiona Apple and Nickel Creek were performing. The sky was falling the last time I went to an outdoor concert in Central Park, but by the time we reached our seats, the early-evening air was benignly balmy, and no sooner did my friend and I settle ourselves than the members of Nickel Creek charged out from the wings, loaded for bear and ready to play.

I go back a long way with Nickel Creek--I even wrote the liner notes for their greatest-hits album--but two years had gone by since I last saw them in concert, and a year ago they announced that they'd be going on hiatus at the end of 2007. This will likely be their last New York performance, and I expected it to sound a valedictory note. Boy, did I get that wrong. They came on like gangbusters, and within seconds I knew it was going to be a night to remember.

Fiona Apple showed up on stage midway through the first half of the concert. I'd assumed that Nickel Creek was opening for her, but it quickly became clear that they were going to perform together, and as the band tuned up, I thought, I bet they do "Extraordinary Machine." Sure enough, they did, and I hugged myself with glee. Fiona Apple had been nothing more than a name to me until I received an e-mail last fall from my favorite blogger containing an audio file and instructions to listen to it at once. It was the title track from Extraordinary Machine, and by the time it was halfway over, I was a fan. Talk about good omens!

Mere words can't begin to convey how strange and wonderful it was to hear Apple singing with a progressive bluegrass-pop band whose members are equally fond of Bill Monroe and Radiohead. Among many other things, they did Gilllian Welch's "I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll" and Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight," and the effect was...well, would it sound too fancy-schmancy to call it exquisite? Rarely do I wish for a concert to last longer--enough is enough--but this one went on for two and a half hours, and I ate up each and every song.

The biggest surprise was "I Walk a Little Faster," a standard ballad by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh whose lyrics have long had special meaning for me. Hearing them sung by Fiona Apple on a balmy summer evening came close to overwhelming me: I set my chin a little higher,/Hope a little longer,/Build a little stronger/Castle in the air,/And thinking you'll be there,/I walk a little faster.

Yes, New York City is a difficult and (on occasion) frightening place in which to live. The low-flying helicopters and airplanes that cleaved the night sky over Central Park were sufficient reminder of that. But it is also full of daily miracles of serendipity, and the life I lead there is rich in experience and delight beyond anything I envisioned for myself when young. May I never take that blessed fact for granted.

Posted August 15, 12:25 AM

TT: Ten things I've never done

• Eaten a snail

• Had sex on an airplane (I did engage in some medium-voltage hanky-panky in a radio studio once upon a time, but the mike wasn't open)

• Shot an animal

• Fainted

• Seen the complete Ring of the Nibelung on stage (not in this lifetime, baby!)

• Watched a person die

• Read Bleak House all the way through (I'm still trying, though)

• Broken a bone

• Done a cartwheel (these two items may be related)

• Waltzed

Posted August 15, 12:00 AM

TT: No, but I read the novel

From last Friday's Wall Street Journal:

"Dud Avocado," a 1958 comic novel about Hollywood by Elaine Dundy, is being developed into a film by producer Sara Risher, who is working with longtime rights holder Twentieth Century Fox. "The re-release made me realize it was timeless," Ms. Risher says.

If you haven't bought it already...well, what's keeping you?

Posted August 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

George Orwell, "Some Notes on Salvador Dali" (courtesy of The Rat)

Posted August 15, 12:00 AM

August 14, 2007

TT and OGIC: Attention, Los Angeles!

We just received this e-mail from Sara Kramer of New York Review Books:

I'm trying to spread the word about Elaine Dundy's appearance at Book Soup in LA tonight. The book's been doing so well (thanks in no small part to the two of you) and I think it's finding the audience it deserves, but I don't know if people in the LA area will have heard about the event.

I think that About Last Night can boast some of the most concentrated Dud Avocado love on the internet, so what better place to begin?

We agree (and we suspect that CAAF feels the same way).

For more information, go here.

Posted August 14, 11:18 AM

CAAF: 5 X 5 Books of Disaster & Woe by Katharine Weber

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week's installment comes from Katharine Weber, whose fascinating novel Triangle is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.

I was a morbid child, they (teachers, my mother) said. My favorite moments in the relatively sunny Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books were the near-death of the entire family in the "Fever and Ague" chapter in Little House on the Prairie
and the threat of starvation in The Long Winter . My Ordeal by Hunger Donner Party book report in sixth grade was deemed tomboyish and strange by most of my classmates (the boy before me reported on a biography of Thomas Edison and the girl after me reported on My Friend Flicka). My Evanston relatives were impatient with my wishes to visit landmarks to feed my Chicago Fire fascination. Whenever I had a cold I would try to suppress my coughing the way Anne Frank in her secret annex had to, during office hours. I was a font of Titanic trivia long before Leonardo DiCaprio was born. Maybe feasting on all that disaster helped my own chaotic childhood feel comparatively safe and organized. Maybe all those disaster books were like survival handbooks for me, illuminating my private secret sense that I could have endured and managed to find my way through those events; surely I would have been one of the canny ones, equipped with fine-tuned survival instincts.

1. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George Stewart. The very words "Donner Party" offer a frisson of horror and then a snicker you don't want to own, because you don't quite know what to do with that incongruently festive designation. Bad decisions, snow, worse decisions, more snow, bad luck, more snow, and then comes the cannibalism you anticipate from the first page.

2. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Who cares if the prose is merely adequate when the story is among the best tragedies in the history of the civilization? This is the definitive account for those of us who prefer our Titanic the way she was last seen, strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee" (probably) wafting from the strings of the heroic musicians who played on the deck until the end, when the ship upended and slid to the bottom of the sea. Lord's book was published the year I was born, many decades before technology could dilute the mystery by providing salvage loot and glimpses of that sad rusting hulk on the ocean floor (not to mention a terrible framing device for that movie).

3. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Endless winter plus starvation and cannibalism, plus Nazi atrocities -- so many of my favorite obsessions are represented in this stirring, majestic book.

4. The Circus Fire: The True Story of an American Tragedy by Stewart O'Nan. Circuses and clowns are creepy anyway, even without a conflagration. The horrific 1944 Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford that killed nearly 170 people, more than half of them children, took only a few minutes to ignite, because the immense circus tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. As the tent went up in flames, the waterproofing mixture rained down on the crowd of some eight thousand souls like napalm. Adding to the mystery and horror, several of the children were never identified, most famously the eerily beautiful Little Miss 1565. This elegant account, which gets my vote for best Stewart O'Nan book, is informed by dozens of interviews with survivors of the fire. Many of them described the hideous, unforgettable sounds of the trapped animals burning. The eerie still point at the heart of the book is when O'Nan follows the eyewitness accounts of the animals screaming with the quiet statement that no animals were burned in the fire.

5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. Ambition, hubris, bravery, selfishness, death, and a bizarre cast of characters. An irresistible, horrible sequence of events with all the elements of a thriller, this is a book that succeeds because Krakauer tells the story with clarity and insight.

Posted August 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Popular art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization."

Abraham Kaplan, "Aesthetics of the Popular Arts"

Posted August 14, 12:00 AM

August 13, 2007

TT: Return of the native (by increments)

Here I am again! I've wrapped up my nine-day whirlwind theater tour of New England, and will be headed back to Manhattan shortly. I saw and did plenty of interesting stuff while I was gone, and I plan to tell you all about it--but not today, and not all at once.

Having been absent from the Big Apple for a whole month, I've got a lot of snail mail to read, a lot of shows to see, and a lot of people with whom I urgently need to catch up. All this being the case, I'll share my recent adventures with you on the installment plan, and it'll be a couple of days before the first installment arrives. In the meantime, I've updated the Top Fives, so take a look and see what's new.

As always, CAAF and OGIC are alive, well, and ready to entertain you--and me--while I find my footing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to pack.

Posted August 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Men at work (II)

I'm still hard at work on The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham's play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. Paul is writing the music, I the words, and I knocked off a huge chunk of the latter while I was up in Connecticut last month. In fact, I finished the first complete draft of the entire eight-scene libretto. Paul and I are both pleased with it, though we'll put it through the wringer of revision several more times before we're done. Nevertheless, I believe we've got ourselves a libretto, and it sounds like a libretto, by which I mean that it reads like an opera, not a straight play.

An opera libretto resembles a play at first glance, but the differences are bigger than you might realize. To begin with, a libretto is shorter than a play, since it takes longer to sing words than to speak them. For the record, the first draft of The Letter is 8,700 words long, roughly half the length of the play on which it's based. (By way of comparison, Macbeth, Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, is 18,301 words long.) I expect it will shrink still further before it reaches its final form. Yet our version of The Letter tracks the action of Maugham's original play fairly closely.

So what happened to the rest of the play? Some was cut outright--I started by eliminating two of Maugham's characters--and the remainder was trimmed ruthlessly. Paul and I have said all along that we want the operatic version of The Letter to feel like a movie, which means, above all, that it must move. The current London revival of the stage play runs for two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission. William Wyler's 1940 film version, on the other hand, is ninety-five minutes long, and our goal is to bring the opera in at an intermission-free hour and a half.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my "trimming" quickly turned into rewriting, much of it radical. The Letter is a prosy play, and no sooner did I start working on the dialogue than I realized that most of it was unsingable in its original form. I had to make it more lyrical. The first step in doing that is to strip away every superfluous word. When writing a libretto, you must always keep in mind that each and every word you write will be accompanied by music--and that the music, if it does its job, will tell the audience what the characters are thinking and feeling. You don't have to spell things out: the composer does that for you. Nor is there much room for subtlety, since opera is a primary-color medium that deals exclusively in large, explicit emotions. You don't need a lot of words to say I love you or I hate you or I want to see you hang. (That last line, by the way, comes straight from the libretto of The Letter.)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Budd Boetticher's Comanche Station on TV for the first time since I'd written about it in the essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader. Boetticher's Westerns have a reputation for being talky, but in fact Burt Kennedy's script is masterly in its economy. Most of the first reel contains no dialogue at all, and elsewhere the characters never say ten words when three will do.

Here's a typical exchange between Randolph Scott, the stoic hero of Comanche Station, and Claude Akins, the charming villain:

AKINS It wouldn't surprise me if somebody didn't try to take that woman away from you.

SCOTT Like you, for instance?

AKINS Like me, in particular.

As I listened to that scene, I thought, They don't call 'em horse operas for nothing!

So far as I know, there are no how-to-do-it books about libretto writing. You have to figure it out yourself, and it didn't take me long to figure out that the trick is to lay back, keep it simple, and give the composer plenty of room to make things happen. I spelled a lot of things out in the early drafts of The Letter, but in each successive editing pass, egged on by Paul, I tried to cut all the way down to the bare bones of emotion.

Here'