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December 31, 2007

TT: Almanac

MRS. FINNEY: Can't we have some peace in this house, even on New Year's Eve?

SADIE: You got it mixed up with Christmas. New Year's Eve is when people go back to killing each other.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives

Posted December 31, 12:00 AM

December 28, 2007

TT: Life without Broadway

This week's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to my annual rundown of the shows and performances I liked best in the year just past.

It's a long list, consisting mainly (but by no means exclusively) of off-Broadway and out-of-town productions, though I did find room for several Broadway shows, including (no surprises here) Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, the Roundabout Theatre Company's Pygmalion, and the revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming that I reviewed enthusiastically in last week's column.

As for the news from elsewhere, I make mention of the excellence of theater in Chicago, the acting of Hal Holbrook and James Whitmore, the funniest show I saw in 2007, and numerous other good things.

To read all about it--and to find out who the very amusing lady in the photo is--go here.

Posted December 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Man and wife, being two, are one in love."

William Shakespeare, Henry V

Posted December 28, 12:00 AM

December 27, 2007

TT: Oscar Peterson, R.I.P.

Oscar Peterson, who died on Sunday, was one of a handful of jazz musicians to have cultivated a virtuoso technique comparable to that of the greatest classical instrumentalists. In part for this reason, he never got along well with jazz critics, most of whom were (and are) too musically ignorant to appreciate the near-unique nature of his achievement. Peterson's peers knew better. He was very, very popular--every great virtuoso is--but it was his fellow artists who gauged his worth most accurately. Like Buddy Rich, he left a trail of collegial awe behind him wherever he went.

Peterson got more bad reviews than any other major jazz pianist, and on occasion he deserved them. Miles Davis, one of the few musicians of importance to have said anything unpleasant about him, famously remarked that Peterson "makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues." That was both nasty and untrue, but it did point to the chink in his armor. Unlimited virtuosity is a snare for the unwary artist. "Only in limitation," Goethe wrote, "is mastery revealed." Peterson's extreme technical facility, by contrast, sometimes lured him into the trap of glibness. When he was coasting, all you heard was the fireworks. Nor did it help that he recorded so prolifically throughout his seven-decade-long career. No one can make that many records save at the price of consistent inspiration, and Peterson paid that price too often for comfort.

He was at his best from 1953 to 1958, when he led a drummerless trio featuring the guitarist Herb Ellis and the bassist Ray Brown that was celebrated for its aggressive, unrelenting swing. Peterson and his colleagues modeled themselves on the legendary King Cole Trio, but unlike that deliciously easy-going ensemble, the Peterson Trio was a straight-ahead group whose members favored fast tempos and liked nothing better than to light the afterburner and take off. Most of their recordings are out of print, but The Oscar Peterson Trio at Zardi's, a thrilling live album recorded in 1955 at a Los Angeles nightclub, captures them at their most characteristic.

When Ellis decided to quit the road, Peterson replaced him not with another guitarist but with a drummer, the tasteful and elegant Ed Thigpen, thereby recharging his creative batteries for another half-dozen years. It was this version of the Oscar Peterson Trio that recorded most frequently, and one must pick and choose carefully among its many albums to get a clear sense of how good the group could be. Fortunately--and not coincidentally--the most popular of its recordings, Night Train, is also one of the finest. An after-hours 1962 studio set devoted to blues tunes and blues-flavored pop songs, Night Train shows how deeply Peterson could dig when he felt like laying back instead of showing off.

Peterson's later albums are typically less interesting than the ones he made with Brown, Ellis, and Thigpen, but My Favorite Instrument, a 1968 collection of unaccompanied piano solos called that was privately recorded in Germany under optimal circumstances, is worthy of special mention. His playing here is both precisely controlled and consistently inspired, and even his harshest critics have singled it out as noteworthy. I also like The Trio, a live set from 1973 featuring the guitarist Joe Pass and the bassist Niels Pedersen, which contains a version of Nat Cole's "Easy Listening Blues" that shows how much Peterson learned from his nonpareil predecessor.

In addition to recording with his own groups, Peterson cut hundreds of albums as a sideman, most of them made in the days when he was barnstorming with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic concert troupes and doubling as house pianist for Verve, Granz's record label. He recorded with everyone who worked for Granz--Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, Lester Young, even Fred Astaire--and his sensitive, discreet support rarely failed to stimulate those for whom he played. Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, recorded in 1957, is an especially choice example of his prowess as an accompanist.

Peterson also wrote a memoir, A Jazz Odyssey, about which I wrote in Commentary when it was published in 2002:

I can think of no other jazz autobiography that has made the mysteries of music-making so readily accessible to the lay reader. Even those who dislike Oscar Peterson's playing will find his book informative--surely a near-unprecedented achievement....

Despite his gifts as a raconteur, Peterson is not a natural writer--his ghostwritten prose is too often stiff and ostentatious--but when he speaks of music, the results have a clarity and specificity rarely found in books of this genre. And unlike most jazz memoirists, he is even willing to be critical of other players, including some of the most admired musicians in jazz. Peterson's analysis of the "uneven and unfinished" playing of the bebop pianist Bud Powell, for instance, cuts sharply against the grain of conventional critical wisdom, and whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, they merit close scrutiny, not only in their own right but for the perspective they offer on his own remarkable technical achievements.

Alas, A Jazz Odyssey is out of print, but Gene Lees' Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing is still available in paperback. An intelligent and warmly sympathetic biography by one of the few jazz critics who appreciated Peterson properly, it profits from Lees' close friendship with his subject.

Peterson was crippled by a stroke in 1993, and though he continued to play in public, his last performances added no luster to his reputation. Now that the long sunset of his post-stroke career is over, my guess is that he will fade from view for a time--perhaps even a long time. But sooner or later some patient and industrious critic will sift through the mountain of variably inspired recordings that he left behind, separate the wheat from the chaff, and tell a later generation of listeners what those who admired Oscar Peterson in his lifetime already know: when he was good, no one was better.

Posted December 27, 12:14 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.

Tickets to all of these shows were available at the box office last week.

Because of the recently settled stagehands' strike, many Broadway shows are offering heavily discounted tickets to certain performances. For information, go here.

BROADWAY:
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 9, reviewed here)
• 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 Farnsworth Invention (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Grease (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Homecoming (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)
• Is He Dead? (farce, G, reasonably family-friendly, reviewed here)
• Rock 'n' Roll * (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, reviewed here)
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Devil's Disciple (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, closes Jan. 27, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• Cymbeline (drama, PG, too complicated for kids, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)
• The Glorious Ones (musical, R, extremely bawdy, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Things We Want (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted December 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

KATHY: Eddie's the only fella in town who doesn't pass judgment on people.

ED: That's right. If I did, I wouldn't have any friends.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, screenplay for Ed Wood

Posted December 27, 12:00 AM

December 26, 2007

TT: Almanac

These are enough
Left overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week--
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio

Posted December 26, 12:00 AM

December 25, 2007

TT: Almanac

"'Home' is any four walls that enclose the right person."

Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl

Posted December 25, 12:00 AM

December 24, 2007

TT: Give and take

I'm writing these words at nine a.m. on Christmas Eve. Not a creature is stirring, not even Mrs. T, who isn't a morning person, or my mother, who went to bed gratefully last night and with any luck will sleep a little while longer. The sun is shining in Smalltown, U.S.A., something it evidently felt no need to do last week. I showed up on Thursday after a more than usually tedious eleven-hour journey and plunged myself into the complicated routine of taking care of my seventy-eight-year-old mother, who broke her pelvis two months ago. Mrs. T flew out to Smalltown to look after her while I wrapped up my remaining deadlines for 2007, and now I'm here, too, making coffee, running errands, and exuding all the good cheer I have in me.

The sunshine helps, as does the season. Mrs. T put up a Christmas tree in the living room last week, and I opened up the old spinet piano the other day and banged out carols and seasonal songs to the best of my now-limited ability. Still, I feel a bit like Othello right now: my occupation's gone. I'm too preoccupied with looking after my mother to work on my Louis Armstrong biography or do any serious reading, I don't have any pieces due until the second week in January, and the nearest theater is two hours away (though I heard the other day that the Smalltown Little Theater was holding auditions for its spring production of South Pacific).

So yes, I'm at loose ends--but very, very glad to be. What better way is there to spend Christmas, after all, than the way I'm spending this one? I'm with the people I love most, helping to take care of someone who not so long ago took loving care of me. As folks say around here, that's the reason for the season, and a good one, too.

I hear one of my housemates stirring, so I'll see you later. Merry Christmas to all!

Posted December 24, 2:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world."

Calvin Coolidge, presidential message, Dec. 25, 1927

Posted December 24, 12:00 AM

December 22, 2007

APPOINTMENT WITH BIG BROTHER

"Asked whether the Philharmonic would be handing North Korea a propaganda victory by playing in Pyongyang, Mr. Mehta replied, 'We're not going to do any propaganda. We're going there to create some joy.' Somehow I doubt that playing Gershwin's An American in Paris and Dvorak's New World Symphony for 1,500 hand-picked servants of the regime will bring joy to the inmates of the North Korean Gulag..."

Posted December 22, 12:45 PM

TT: Appointment with Big Brother

My "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal goes after the management of the New York Philharmonic for agreeing to send the orchestra to North Korea:

Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic...shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America's oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me--no other word is strong enough--to see them sitting next to the smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.

In public as well as in private, the management of the Philharmonic has made it clear that the orchestra is going to North Korea with "the encouragement and support of the U.S. Department of State" (to quote from the press release announcing the trip). While Mr. Mehta went out of his way to say that no pressure was put on the orchestra, it's widely believed that the White House means to use the concert as a bargaining chip in its ongoing negotiations with Pyongyang.

I leave it to more qualified observers to predict whether anything of value will emerge from these negotiations. But it is not the job of the New York Philharmonic to enact foreign policy, much less to besmirch its own honor by taking part in what, in a previous column on this topic, I called "a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime." Nor do you have to be a diplomat to know that Mr. Guenther was blowing smoke when he compared the trip to the 1989 concert that Leonard Bernstein and members of the Philharmonic gave at the soon-to-be-dismantled Berlin Wall. Nobody is tearing any walls down in North Korea....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted December 22, 11:45 AM

December 21, 2007

CAAF: Christmas movies

It's A Wonderful Life leaves Mr. Tingle va klempt but I tend to wander off halfway through. However, there are a few movies we always watch together this time of year: Thin Man (for the Christmas party scene); Wonder Boys (not technically a Christmas movie but it feels like one, and not just because of all the snow and sleet); and the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy (because nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like 10,000 Orcs on your doorstep).

The other Christmas-watching tradition calls for Mr. Tingle (who is a tolerant man) to trundle an old television with VCR attachment from our attic so I can watch a VHS tape of Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing The Nutcracker. This year I intended to pair it with Mark Morris's Hard Nut, which Terry recommended here a while back, but Netflix has alas, not obliged.

I plan to pop in here next week. But just in case: I wish you all a merry and joyful holiday!

Posted December 21, 12:04 PM

CAAF: Holiday tipples, fictional meals

• It's hard to read this list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels and not want to head immediately to the store to pick up the ingredients for some Smoking Bishops. (via Bookslut.)

• Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder (so secondeth Strindberg).

I've not yet had absinthe, and I long to try a thimbleful. My adult self feels about it the way my kid self once felt about Turkish delight. As you'll remember, Turkish delight is what the White Witch gives Edmund a packet of in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it sounded so mysterious and delectable. I have a distinct memory of standing in front of the candy counter at the Marshall-Fields in Chicago as a child looking in vain for the tray of Turkish delight. (A few years ago a friend brought some home from a cruise in Greece, and I finally got to try some. It turns out that Turkish delight is made up of oddly nubby, jelly-like candies covered in powdery sugar. Not quite what I imagined -- which was something even more snowy with a deep emerald center -- but still very satisfying to eat.)

It's funny how many of the food descriptions one reads as a child stick. For me it wasn't just the Turkish delight from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe that I fancied, but also the buttery toast points and tea Lucy has with Mr. Tumnus. The blancmange Jo brings Laurie in Little Women. The acorn pancakes in My Side of the Mountain. And the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the toad in the hole in Danny the Champion of the World.

Meanwhile, the list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels makes me want to re-read Pickwick Papers and make a list of all the food consumed in it. The club eats so many gluttonous meals, many of the components of which, if I remember correctly, are pleasantly strange and slightly disgusting to read about now.

Posted December 21, 11:26 AM

TT: Home is where the hate is

I reviewed two plays in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, one on Broadway (Harold Pinter's The Homecoming) and one off (George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, performed by the Irish Repertory Theatre). Here's a preview.

* * *

"What the hell was that all about?" said the friend who went with me to "The Homecoming" as we left the theater. The last scene of Harold Pinter's best-known play hasn't lost its power to reduce audiences to head-scratching confusion 40 years after it was first seen on Broadway. But even if you're not sure what all of "The Homecoming" is all about, you'll still get the message of the viciously comic revival now playing on Broadway--and you'll revel in the work of six actors who definitely know what's what....

Daniel Sullivan is one of New York's most uneven directors, but when he's hot, he's hot, and his staging of "The Homecoming" cuts like a hacksaw. Ian McShane, Eve Best (who is a very great actress in the making) and Raúl Esparza have the showiest parts and make the strongest impressions, though no apologies need be made for their colleagues, or for Eugene Lee's seedy set, which looks as though someone had worked it over with a wrecking ball....

Like so many of Shaw's plays, "The Devil's Disciple" is a sneaky piece of theatrical prestidigitation in which the shell of an old-fashioned Victorian melodrama is stuffed with decidedly un-Victorian notions about morality ("He has been too well brought up by a pious mother to have any sense or manhood left in him"). Director Tony Walton, who also designed the production, takes care to keep the pace brisk--not even the preacher is preachy--and the cast responds to his lightness of touch with acting to match. John Windsor-Cunningham comes close to stealing the show as the urbane General Burgoyne, but Lorenzo Pisoni and Curzon Dobell steal it right back from him, and Cristin Milioti catches the eye and ear in the supporting role of Essie, the bastard waif who loves Dick in her own desperate way....

* * *

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted December 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

And though in tinsel chain and popcorn rope
My tree, a captive in your window bay,
Has lost its footing on my mountain slope
And lost the stars of heaven, may, oh, may
The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling
Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.

Robert Frost, "To a Young Wretch"

Posted December 21, 12:00 AM

December 20, 2007

TT: Holding pattern

I just learned that my flight from Newark will be departing fifty-five minutes late, up from a half-hour when I arrived at the airport. I'm too tired to be irritated, especially since I learned long ago that no matter what may happen along the way, it's going to take me at least nine hours to get from New York to Smalltown, U.S.A. Getting to the airport from the Upper West Side, flying from the New York area to St. Louis, traveling south by shuttle bus from there to Smalltown...that's a full day's travel any way you slice it, and most of it is destined to be wasted.

I can burn off a certain amount of time doing a certain amount of work now that I travel with a wireless-equipped MacBook, but while I'm capable of doing serious writing on a plane or in a departure lounge if absolutely necessary, what comes out in the absence of the spur of necessity tends not to be very good. So more often than not, I spend a significant part of the day standing in lines, looking out airplane windows, and pretending to read.

Would that it were possible to take a train from New York to Smalltown, but the last passenger train to stop in my hometown pulled out of the station more than forty years ago, and the old depot is now a museum. I love trains, so much so that I took a sleeper from New York to Chicago three years ago just so that I could write about it for The Wall Street Journal. Now that I'm cooling my heels in Newark, it strikes me that you might enjoy reading that piece--I know I would--so here is "Sleepless on the Lake Shore Limited."

For the record, the dateline, which I wrote with the utmost pleasure, was Between New York and Chicago.

* * *

I grew up dreaming of long-distance trains. They were in the songs I loved ("I took a trip on a train/And I thought about you") and the movies I watched ("I tipped the steward $5 to seat you here if you should come in"). Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood, and their braying whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I'd never been.

Alas, the highways and airlines were killing off passenger trains long before I figured out exactly what Cary Grant wanted to do to Eva Marie Saint on the Twentieth Century Limited. By the time I was old enough to travel alone, I took it for granted that I'd never spend a night in a sleeper car, watching the world rumble by. So when the Department of Homeland Security raised America's alert status from yellow to orange a few days before I had to fly from New York to Chicago to look at plays, it struck me that this might well be my last chance to satisfy a longtime craving. I tore up my plane ticket, paid a visit to www.amtrak.com, booked a Viewliner Standard Bedroom on the Lake Shore Limited, and prepared to find out what I'd been missing all these years.

Robert Frost once wrote a poem about a songbird whose autumnal task was to tell his listeners "what to make of a diminished thing." As I laid eyes on the cramped roomette in which I would be spending the next 20 hours, I knew that would be my job as well. A Viewliner Standard Bedroom stuffs two seats, a toilet and a foldaway sink into slightly more than 23 square feet of floor space, about the size of an Upper West Side walk-in closet. If you want a compartment similar in size to the one in which Grant wooed Saint in "North by Northwest," you'll have to shell out a lot more. (I paid $684 for my round-trip fare between New York and Chicago, meals included.)

The train slipped smoothly out of New York's Penn Station at 2:50 p.m., right on time, and within minutes we had popped out of the tunnel and were rattling northward along the Hudson River. That was when I understood why people still take sleepers. The windows in each compartment are huge, the view transfixing. I scarcely noticed that the compartment itself was shabby and rundown, or that the miniature TV on which Amtrak invited me to view "Seabiscuit" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" was out of order. I'd brought along a laptop, a DVD of "Strangers on a Train" and several books, but I spent every spare minute of daylight gazing out at bleak brown hills, ice-flecked brooks, tiny cemeteries and stations with names like Cold Springs and Breakneck Ridge, all made beautiful beyond imagining by the golden winter sunset.

The red carpets and fresh flowers of yesteryear are long gone, but Amtrak's cheerful porters do their best to pretend that things are what they used to be, and the dining car still serves its perfectly edible hot meals on china and white linen, seating strangers together in the snug booths. I didn't run across any footloose Hitchcock blondes, but I did meet a lot of nice fellow travelers, most of whom could be divided into four groups: train buffs, fearful flyers, grumpy Europeans who'd expected something fancier, and senior citizens who've been taking the train for a half-century and aren't about to quit now. Except for the Europeans, all were friendly and talkative.

The porter made up my hard, narrow berth after dinner. It was so uncomfortable that I barely slept, but I didn't care. Instead, I looked at the twinkling lights of the small towns of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and as the whistle blew, I thought, I'm riding one of the trains I dreamed about when I was a boy. This is the whistle that made me wonder what the rest of the world was like--and now I know.

We pulled into Union Station an hour late. I caught a cab to the Art Institute of Chicago to see "Manet and the Sea." The driver sang along with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on the radio, and I sang along with him, unshowered, underslept and glowing with happiness. Train travel may not be what it used to be, and it definitely costs too much to do more than occasionally. But if you want a sweet taste of what America was like in a slower, quieter age, book a bedroom on the Lake Shore Limited. You can always sleep at home.

Posted December 20, 1:35 PM

TT: Over the river and through the woods

I'm off to Smalltown, U.S.A., where Mrs. T and my family are waiting impatiently for me.

I might possibly do a little blogging while I'm gone, but I expect to spend most of my time immersed in family-type holiday activities, especially since I just finished taping two TV segments and writing nine pieces in a row--five Wall Street Journal columns, three Contentions book columns, and a Commentary essay, believe it or not. (Don't try this at home!)

Seeing as how the point of all this frenzied literary activity was not to have to do any writing in Smalltown, it strikes me that to blog from there would be counterproductive. So except for the daily almanac entry and the usual theater-related postings, don't expect to be hearing too much from me until Mrs. T and I return to New York some time around the turn of the year.

In the meantime, may all your Christmases be bright--and may you spend them in the company of a loving family, traditional or otherwise.

Posted December 20, 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.

Because of the recently settled stagehands' strike, many Broadway shows are offering heavily discounted tickets to certain performances. For information, go here.

BROADWAY:
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 9, reviewed here)
• 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 Farnsworth Invention (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Is He Dead? (farce, G, reasonably family-friendly, reviewed here)
• Rock 'n' Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, reviewed here)
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SOON:
• Cymbeline (drama, PG, too complicated for children, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)
• The Glorious Ones (musical, R, extremely bawdy, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEKEND:
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)
• Things We Want (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

Posted December 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit.

T.S. Eliot, "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"

Posted December 20, 12:00 AM

December 19, 2007

OGIC: More on Frau

After I posted last week about seeing Chicago Lyric's splendid production of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, Lisa Hirsch, who blogs knowledgeably about such matters at Iron Tongue of Midnight, wrote to me with an assessment of the opera's plot that is just too brilliant not to be shared:

The plot drives me mad, between the idea that no one can possibly be fulfilled without children and the sheer ponderousness that results from taking "The Magic Flute," layering on another dozen characters, replacing the Masonic allegories with something Hoffmansthal made up, and carefully cutting out all the wit and humor of the Mozart. Still, the music glitters and thunders, and the Empress's transformation scene, done well, is one of the great scenes in all opera. But then I have to put my head in my hands during the damned chorus of unborn children--sheesh!

Hahahahaha! So it wasn't just me.

Lisa was also kind enough to recommend to me some recordings of the opera: this full recording of a Wolfgang Sawallisch production and two cut versions conducted by Karl Bohm and Herbert von Karajan.

Posted December 19, 11:33 PM

OGIC: The Netflix ten

Better late than never, right? It's been a little more than a week since Terry asked me and Carrie to supply the names of 10 movies released since fall 2005 that we most enjoyed. Carrie weighed in with five of hers here, with impressive annotation to boot. I'm offering mine in a straight-out list, sans commentary, but with the caveat that I'm not entirely sure I'm remembering everything. In no particular order, the top ten are:

1. Friends with Money
2. The Descent*
3. Half Nelson
4. Casino Royale ( great minds)
5. Serenity (ditto)
6. The Lives of Others
7. Once
8. Ratatouille
9. Killer of Sheep
10. No Country for Old Men

I asterisked The Descent because I know Terry won't like it: it's a bloody, terrifying horror movie that I happened to like enough to put on this list. Not Terry's cup of cocoa at all. Some honorable mentions that provided solid entertainment or better are Fracture, Dan in Real Life, Michael Clayton, Sunshine, and The Family Stone. And tomorrow you'll probably hear about the half dozen movies that I forgot!

Here are ten from that same stretch of time that I want to see:

1. The New World
2. Tristram Shandy
3. Brick
4. Clean
5. United 93
6. The Devil Wears Prada
7. The Science of Sleep
8. The Last King of Scotland
9. The Fountain
10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Like Terry, I'll be pretty much dark for the extended Christmas. So until next time, happy holidays, one and all.

Posted December 19, 11:31 PM

TT: Still repenting

Last year I admitted that I'd guessed wrong about the future in an essay called The Myth of "Classic" TV that I wrote for the Sunday New York Times in 2001.

In that piece I argued that "there seems to be something in the nature of even the best TV dramas which renders them ephemeral," meaning that there could be no such thing as a "classic" TV show:

I can't tell you how many times I have looked at George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, but though I suppose the day may come when it no longer has anything new to say to me, I still find it a source of apparently inexhaustible interest, and try to see it at least once a year. Every art form has produced innumerable masterpieces which, like The Four Temperaments, demand to be experienced repeatedly--every art form, that is, except for series television....

Season-long chunks of TV series like The Sopranos were just beginning to be released on videocassette in 2001, but I predicted that they wouldn't become popular. Needless to say, the market has proved me wrong, at least in the short run, though I was still arguing as late as last September that "[n]o matter how 'novel-like' [a TV show like] Homicide may seem to be, there's simply too much of it to embrace in the all-absorbing way we embrace a novel."

True? Let me quote once again from "The Myth of 'Classic' TV":

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

I mention all this because American Life TV, a cable channel of whose existence I only just became aware, is now showing reruns of Hill Street Blues every Sunday. Hill Street Blues was, most TV historians agree, the first hour-long cop show to break with the old-fashioned style of TV drama. Every contemporary series whose plots are arranged in multi-episode "story arcs" and whose characters are photographed with hand-held cameras and portrayed with a combination of tough-minded realism and rough-edged humor is a direct descendant of Hill Street Blues, which I watched faithfully throughout most of its six-year run and thought at the time to be the best TV series ever made.

"Chipped Beef," which first aired on December 17, 1981, midway through the second season of Hill Street Blues, was one of the first episodes I saw--maybe even the first. Yet when I sat down to watch it a few weeks ago, I was astonished by how clearly I remembered bits and pieces of the plot, and--more important--by how fresh the show had remained after a quarter-century. I started watching it purely as an experiment, but in minutes I was completely engrossed all over again, and since then I've watched two more episodes and liked them even more.

Am I viewing Hill Street Blues through nostalgia-colored bifocals? Probably. I have no doubt whatsoever that part of the appeal it holds for me now is the way in which it reminds me of myself when young. That was half a lifetime ago and half a continent away, back in the days when I lived in a suburb of Kansas City, worked as a teller in an inner-city bank, reviewed concerts at night, played jazz on weekends, and had yet to visit an art gallery or eat a bagel or or meet any of the people who are now my best friends. I don't know whether the world was simpler then, but my world was both simpler and a good deal more innocent, and it was still possible for me to be pulled up short by a well-written, well-acted TV show whose makers reminded us each week that life is hard and the good guys don't always win.

Nowadays I spend too many nights on the aisle to commit myself to theater on the installment plan. Not even The Sopranos was capable of holding my attention over the long haul. When I gave it up midway through its fourth season, I also gave up series TV. Buffy and Gilmore Girls were my last such ventures, and I watched them in batches (courtesy of Our Girl) rather than week by week. But I intend to stick with Hill Street Blues for a little while longer. After all, man cannot live by masterpieces alone, and for now I find that it amuses me to spend the odd hour watching Frank Furillo, Phil Esterhaus, Captain Freedom, and the men and women of Hill Street Station doing battle with the lengthening shadow of urban decay. Even if it isn't exactly a classic, it definitely beats Law and Order all hollow.

* * *

The first and second seasons of Hill Street Blues are available on DVD, and the first three seasons can also be purchased from iTunes.

Posted December 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Call a truce, then, to our labours--let us feast with friends and neighbours,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

Rudyard Kipling, "Christmas in India"

Posted December 19, 12:00 AM

December 18, 2007

PLAY

The Seafarer (Booth, 222 W. 45). What's the Broadway show to see if you're only seeing one? I strongly recommend Conor McPherson's uncommonly powerful fantasy about an unhappy Irishman (David Morse) who swears off the booze and finds himself standing face to face with the Divvil Himself. "The stuff of greatness," say the posters. "Do not miss this play!" Yes, that's what I wrote in The Wall Street Journal, except for the gratuitous exclamation point, and I meant every word (TT).

Posted December 18, 11:05 PM

BOOK

David Parkinson, The Rough Guide to Film Musicals (Rough Guides, $14.99 paper). A decently written, unexpectedly sensible primer that walks you through the long and winding road that leads from The Jazz Singer to Chicago. Some films are undervalued, others overrated, but for the most part Parkinson plays it down the center, steering clear of the twin ditches of academic theory and camp silliness. If Sweeney Todd has you wondering whether there's more to the genre than Busby Berkeley, this is a good place to find out what it's all about (TT).

Posted December 18, 11:05 PM

CD

Bill Evans, Conversations With Myself. Looking for the perfect Christmas present, either for yourself or someone you love? Try this classic 1963 album, on which the most influential jazz pianist of the postwar era overdubbed himself--twice. Listen to Evans Nos. 1, 2, and 3 playing Alex North's "Love Theme from Spartacus" and see if the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand straight up. That was the first Bill Evans track I ever heard, and the impression it made on me back in high school has yet to fade (TT).

Posted December 18, 10:55 PM

DVD

Get Carter. No, not the pointless Sylvester Stallone remake, but the original diamond-hard 1971 neo-noir masterpiece in which Michael Caine is out for revenge and doesn't care who gets hurt along the way. After making this astonishing film, Mike Hodges dropped off the scope for three decades of mostly unmemorable slogging, only to resurface in 1999 with the similarly gripping Croupier. If you liked Croupier, what are you waiting for? (TT).

Posted December 18, 10:54 PM

TT: Present and accounted for

Regular readers of this blog will recognize the name of Louis Kaufman, the great American violinist and art collector who made the first long-playing recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played on the soundtracks of Gone With the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Psycho, performed with Aaron Copland, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud, bought the first painting that Milton Avery ever sold, and wrote a delightful memoir called A Fiddler's Tale: How Hollywood and Vivaldi Discovered Me. Alas, I never met Kaufman--he died in 1994 at the age of eighty-eight--but I've been corresponding with Annette, his wife and accompanist, for the past couple of years, and on Sunday I had the honor of showing her the Teachout Museum and taking her to lunch.

Annette Kaufman is ninety-three years old, but you wouldn't guess it to look at her--or talk to her. Not only is she still easily recognizable as the same woman who sat for Avery six decades ago, but she is a lively, bustling raconteuse who continues to consume art by the carload (she flew to New York from her Los Angeles home to see Prokofiev's War and Peace at the Met). Judging by our conversation, she remembers everything she's seen or heard with a clarity not even slightly diminished by age. I'd been careful to ask whether she could climb the stairs to my third-floor apartment, but it turned out that I was wasting my breath. Not only did she negotiate both flights of stairs with near-arrogant ease, but she took a cab straight from the Upper West Side bistro where we ate omelettes aux fines herbes to the Pissarro retrospective at the Jewish Museum. Spending three hours in her company made me feel...well, lazy.

In her youth Mrs. Kaufman was a wonderfully elegant and sensitive pianist, as you can hear for yourself on the bonus CD bound into A Fiddler's Tale. Nowadays she's too busy giving away the Louis and Annette Kaufman Collection to play much piano, but I have no doubt that if circumstances required her to do so, she could toss off the keyboard part to a Mozart violin sonata with the same casual grace that she brings to her reminiscences of the famous musicians, writers, and painters whom she and her husband knew. "A very interesting man," she said when I showed her "Apples on a Table," my 1923 Marsden Hartley lithograph. "Louis and I met him one day in Milton's studio." I did my best not to goggle.

I took it upon myself to suggest that Mrs. Kaufman pay a visit to the Martin Puryear show currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art, which felt a bit like offering advice to my grandmother on how to suck eggs. Be that as it may, she snapped up my recommendation with what I gather is her customary enthusiasm. "I just joined MoMA!" she replied. "That means I can take a friend with me!"

I also told her about The Letter, only to learn that she's been going to Santa Fe Opera every August since shortly after I was born.

"That's perfect timing," I said. "The premiere is on August 1, 2009."

"I'll be there," she replied.

I don't doubt it.

Posted December 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Walt Kelly, Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

Posted December 18, 12:00 AM

December 17, 2007

TT: Men at work (IV)

Don't hold me to it, but The Letter may be the first opera in the history of classical music that's ahead of schedule. I finished drafting my libretto in August, and Paul Moravec, my collaborator, has now written the music for five of the opera's eight scenes. We have a director (Jonathan Kent) and a cast (no names yet, but you'll be impressed). Richard Gaddes, who runs Santa Fe Opera, tells us that everybody in his shop is pleased with the completed scenes that Paul sent them a few weeks ago. Since our contract calls for us to deliver the piano score next June in anticipation of a premiere date of August 1, 2009, I'd say we're cooking along fairly nicely. We've even gotten paid!

So what could possibly go wrong? Plenty. We like what we've written so far, but we won't know how well it works until we start to see and hear it sung, and we expect to do a lot of tinkering between now and the summer of 2009. In addition, Paul and I have already spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about exactly what we're trying to do, starting long before we actually began to write the opera and continuing to the present moment. Stephen Sondheim says that the first step in a successful collaboration is to make sure that everybody is writing the same show. We're doing our best to follow his advice.

One of the things we both realized early on was that the show we wanted to write was going to be different in theatrical effect from the Somerset Maugham play on which The Letter is based. Maugham's play, as I pointed out back in August, is both prosy and naturalistic. It's also exceedingly cynical in its portrayal of the thwarted love of the principal characters. The problem is that prosy, cynical naturalism is not the stuff of which great opera libretti are made. "Consistency of character and reality of events are qualities which need not be accompanied by music," Karl Kraus said. He got that right. To justify the extraordinary fact that the characters in an opera sing instead of speak, you have to give them something emotionally compelling enough to be worth singing about. Otherwise, you'll end up with a show in which words and music are at war with one another. Try to imagine, say, a musical version of The Narrow Margin and you'll see what I mean. Sure, the plot is exciting, and tough-guy lines like "She's a sixty-cent special--cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy" sound great when rasped out by Charles McGraw--but can you really hear them being sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?

So in addition to making Maugham's flat-textured dialogue lyrical enough to sing, which meant rewriting it virtually from scratch, I also had to heighten the emotional climate of The Letter in such a way as to give Paul, whose music is very intense and dramatic, sufficient room to maneuver. One of the ways I did this was by adding "operatic" situations to the plot. The biggest change I made was to insert a courtroom scene in which Leslie Crosbie (the Bette Davis character, if you've seen the movie) is confronted by the ghost of Geoff Hammond, the man she killed in Scene 1. Of course he's really a hallucination, not a ghost, but the effect is the same, and Geoff's unexpected reappearance in Scene 7 also gives the tenor (yep, he's a tenor) a chance to sing a full-scale aria:

You told them that I raped you,
You spat upon my honor,
You bought back your letter,
You shamed my lover--
And for that you must die.
I hope they hang you, Leslie,
At the end of a long silk rope.
I'll watch you dangle,
Then I'll see you in hell!

Nothing remotely like this occurs in Maugham's play, but it is, needless to say, a quintessentially operatic situation, and I was inspired to create it by a remark made by E.M. Forster in a lecture he gave in 1948 about one of my favorite operas, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes: "It amuses me to think what an opera on Peter Grimes would have been like if I had written it. I should certainly have starred the murdered apprentices. I should have introduced their ghosts in the last scene, rising out of the estuary, on either side of the vengeful greybeard, blood and fire would have been thrown in the tenor's face, hell would have opened, and on a mixture of Don Juan and the Freischütz I should have lowered my final curtain."

That isn't quite what happens in the hallucination scene of The Letter, but you get the idea.

I don't want you to think, by the way, that Paul and I sit around all day quoting Karl Kraus and E.M. Forster to one another. Our collaboration to date has been both aesthetically harmonious and a whole lot of fun, and though we're both full-fledged eggheads, you wouldn't always guess it from the way we work together. At our last session, for instance, Paul was telling me about the flashback in Scene 4 in which Leslie tells her lawyer what really happened on the night she shot Geoff. He was explaining how his music will cover the transition from Leslie's jail cell in Singapore to the living room of her jungle bungalow.

"Remember Wayne's World?" Paul said. "I'll just make the orchestra go whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, and we'll be there."

"Somehow I don't think this is exactly the way that Otello got written," I replied.

Posted December 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

May all my enemies go to hell,
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.

Hilaire Belloc, "Lines For A Christmas Card"

Posted December 17, 12:00 AM

December 14, 2007

CAAF: To The Film Industry In Crisis

Earlier this week Terry asked OGIC and me to put together lists of ten films released since the fall of 2005 for he and Mrs. Teachout to watch. The one caveat: "No spinach, please: I'm out for pleasure, very broadly construed, so don't send me to anything I 'ought' to see (whatever that means) unless it's also something that you loved."

It has been fun to deliberate; and I've tried to be true to the no-spinach rule ("In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love."). Here are my first five, listed in no particular order, with the rest to follow next week. I note with some chagrin that Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle came out a year too early to make the 2005 cutoff, otherwise it would have a spot here. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think you should see it too, if you haven't already.

1. Casino Royale: I'm a big Bond fan, so this movie was a great treat -- and a relief after the franchise's sad last installments, which were like watching video games. Lots of explosions, no feeling. This one seemed to return Bond to the physical realm. A lot of this is thanks to Daniel Craig, who plays the role rougher and with a lower center of gravity than anyone since Connery. Early on there's a fantastic chase sequence on foot -- showcasing freerunning star Sébastien Foucan -- that's so witty and exhilarating that I went back to see the movie twice. So much fun. And j'aime Eva Green.

2. Inside Man: A fresh, intelligent thriller that uses New York the way Collateral used L.A. Its bank robbery plot doesn't quite hang together but I love this movie for the life in it: There's a lot of delight in it for how everyday people talk and act. Plus, it's beautifully shot. The bit where a woman brought in to translate negotiates to get her parking tickets fixed is one of my favorite film scenes of recent years: I wish more movies used their bit characters so well and shined so much around the edges.

3. Pan's Labyrinth: Gorgeously conceived and wrought. I had to hide out for portions of it, though: It'll wring you out.

4. Serenity: Joss Whedon presents Cowboys In Space! Rethinks and improves on the Firefly TV series. The script's a little klunky with exposition in places but it's a nice little ride all the same.

5. The Devil Wears Prada: I liked this comedy: It's bitchy and tart, and there are some lovely clothes to look at (which I know matters a great deal to you, Terry). I also find it amusing to think of this film as a sort of Her Girl Friday, with Streep in the Cary Grant role. Lately, so many love stories on screen seem so neutered -- all hugs and sweaters and understanding gazes (it's like the heroines aren't searching for love so much as a good therapist) -- it's nice to see a romance with some pepper even if it's not, strictly speaking, a romance.

Posted December 14, 2:48 PM

CAAF: The second message was "Oh! My love to yo."

So, I was late to get a cell phone and I still don't really get texting or my phone's other features. Once in a while the phone will make a crazy tweet and I'll find a message on the screen, which I'll read and then phone or email the sender back.

Just now the phone made its crazy tweet and there was a message saying, "Fwd: We are at the hospital." I didn't recognize the number but managed to tap out my first-ever text message: "Sorry Wrong number." And then the phone tweeted again with the message: "Dear Dumbass: One of your dearest friends is currently in labor. Love, her husband."

Actually, that's not what he typed. But he should have.

Posted December 14, 2:35 PM

TT: Mark Twain tonight (sort of)

Things have calmed down--somewhat--on Broadway, so my Wall Street Journal drama column covers only two plays this week, Mark Twain's Is He Dead? and Mark Lamos' Lincoln Center Theater production of Cymbeline. Here's a preview.

* * *

"Is He Dead?" is a farce about the art world that vanished into the author's files and didn't reappear until it was discovered in 2001 by a scholar and optioned by a producer. Six years later, it has opened in a ritzy production directed by Michael Blakemore ("Noises Off") and starring Norbert Leo Butz ("Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"). The results are shriekingly funny--I don't know when I've heard a New York audience laugh louder or longer--in large part because of Mr. Butz, whose performance is a veritable masterpiece of mugging.

Don't be fooled by the flackery, though: "Is He Dead?" may be "by" Twain, but it's a quaintly amateurish piece of work that wouldn't have run for ten minutes on Broadway had David Ives not "adapted" the script to within an inch of its life. The author of "All in the Timing" and "Mere Mortals," is one of this country's smartest comic playwrights, and a line-by-line comparison between the published version of "Is He Dead?" and the one currently being performed at the Lyceum Theatre is the equivalent of a postgraduate course in How to Make Large Numbers of People Guffaw. Mr. Ives has retained Twain's original situations, most of his characters and a fair number of his lines, but he has cut, rearranged, punched up and otherwise transformed them so extensively as to deserve credit not as the play's adapter but as its co-author....

"Cymbeline," which Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his life, is an imaginative retrospective in which he simultaneously deployed all of the time-honored devices that drove his plots: the weak king, the spunky heroine who dresses up as a boy, the misguided husband induced by a scoundrel to test his wife's love. George Bernard Shaw called it "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order," and though that was mere envy speaking, there have been plenty of other equally knowledgeable commentators who failed to grasp what Shakespeare was up to. Henry James dismissed "Cymbeline" as "a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all," and it's true that most productions fail to weave the play's variegated strands into a convincing fabric.

Not so this one. Greatly aided by Michael Yeargan's sumptuously simple sets, Jess Goldstein's gorgeous costumes and Mel Marvin's savory incidental music, Mr. Lamos takes a cue from his parallel career as an opera director and gives us a "Cymbeline" that flows with the irresistible forward momentum of a piece of music. Resplendent pageantry, knockabout comedy, haunting lyricism: All are blended in just proportion, sweeping us toward a climax in which surprise after surprise is detonated like an extra-long string of firecrackers....

* * *

To read the whole thing, go here.

UPDATE: I took Maud with me to see Is He Dead? To find out what she thought of it, go here.

Posted December 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that."

Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain's Own Autobiography

Posted December 14, 12:00 AM

December 13, 2007

TT: In living color

Here's my latest videoblog, produced by The Horizon, Commentary's artblog. In it I talk about the New York Philharmonic's planned visit to North Korea (about which I wrote here) and "The Cult of the Difficult," an essay about modernism that appears in the December issue of Commentary. I also pay a visit to a New York art gallery, Knoedler & Company, and discuss their exhibition of the late paintings of Jules Olitski. (Yes, that's Mrs. T who makes a cameo appearance at the end.)

Enjoy.