Posted December 13, 4:33 PM

CAAF: 5 x 5 Books by Writers that I've Tilted a Few Around by Matthew Eck

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. This week's installment comes from Matthew Eck, whose novel The Farther Shore is the Lit Blog Co-op's Read This! Selection for winter. In a review for Salon, Stephen Elliott described Eck's book as "a truly great war novel by a writer of sizable talent who has come close to war." Keep up with the LBC discussion of the novel going on this week here.

It's that time of the year where we like to get depressed and we like to drink. We visit family and friends -- and pets are left alone for days on end with too little water. In the title I use the word "around" because not all the writers on this list drink. I use the word "few" because I've already embarrassed myself enough out there in the world. But never apologize -- even as you knock over the Christmas tree.

I'm not saying that writers have to drink either, don't get me wrong there. I never drink anything but coffee when I'm writing. Don't dull your senses. Don't introduce bad habits into your writing time.

I think I really chose these books because I must have somehow gotten a little depressed around all these writers at one point. But it's that little bit of depression I carried back to the beauty of their books, their work heavy with loss.

1. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. This is one of those novels where I'll let the writing speak for itself. It has one of the greatest first lines in all of literature: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The writing in the book is unbearably beautiful. Case in point, later in the book:

Behind her, the clouds surrendered their last crimson streaks to a soft, foggy gray. A single tall evergreen tilted against the falling sky. Behind me, the party began to rumble like thunder. Peggy relit the hash pipe, and this time I accepted it from her. We shared the smoke as the evening winds rose off the cold sea, rose up the wooded ridges, and herded the party inside, people muttering thin complaints like children called from play to the fuzzy dreams of the their early beds.

2. Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn. If you've ever wanted to be loved, read this book. And this next sentence has nothing to do with what I just said: Kirn has written some of the finest scenes about Mormon sex, in case that's what you're looking to give, or get, for Christmas. This is one of the few books that made me laugh until I cried -- and not because it's all funny.

3. A Stranger In This World by Kevin Canty. This is one of the few books that made me cry until I needed to laugh. I love to teach "Dogs" and "Pretty Judy." Besides, the man turned me on to Babel. I'll love him forever for that one.

4. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. I do not know Lydia Davis -- let me make that clear. But I once sat in a room where fifteen or twenty MFA-ers were trying to talk to her. Okay, so I wasn't sitting, I was trying as well. I love this book for the way memory tumbles against memory. I love the "nothing" it offers.

5. Tom Thomson In Purgatory by Troy Jollimore. One of the notes I scribbled in the margins of this book reads, "Did you ever get laid on Christmas?" It's not a note to Tom Thomson either. It was fodder for the friend I gave the book to. This is a book you'll have to buy for someone else because it'll say so much to you.

Posted December 13, 12:30 AM

TT: Happy anniversaries

I got out of the hospital two years ago today. I didn't say so in this space at the time, but it was the woman now known as Mrs. T who escorted me home that afternoon. We'd met at a dinner in Baltimore a month or so before, and promptly made plans to see a play in New York (Waiting for Godot, believe it or not) on what ended up being the day after I called an ambulance for myself. Instead she came to visit me at Lenox Hill Hospital, and twenty-two months later we said I do in front of a boatful of astonished and delighted onlookers. Now she's in Smalltown, U.S.A., taking care of my mother. For some mysterious reason, Hilary seems to enjoy taking care of Teachouts.

I wish I were there, and a week from now I will be, but for the moment I still have shows to see and pieces to write. That's why I posted this picture today: I wanted you to see what I'm missing!

It's good to be alive.

Posted December 13, 12:18 AM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town 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 Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)
• The Glorious Ones (musical, R, extremely bawdy, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, completely family-friendly, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON
IN NEW YORK:
• Pygmalion * (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, closes Dec. 16, reviewed here)
• Things We Want (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)
• West Bank, UK (musical, R, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

Posted December 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It fascinates me that O'Neill and Miller write so badly. They could never have been novelists. But James, Dickens and Joyce were simply too eloquent and abundant in language for the stage. It may be that after Shakespeare the link between theater and language begins to fray."

Harold Bloom (courtesy of Histriomastix)

Posted December 13, 12:00 AM

December 12, 2007

OGIC: Opera from the outside

It was a cold, wet, nasty weekend in Chicago last weekend, so for the most part I stayed in. However, I was lured out from under several blankets on Saturday night by the Lyric Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow).

I love going to the opera but, to be honest, still can feel daunted on encountering an art form for which I lack any kind of competent critical apprehension or vocabulary. It's not as if I actually believe that aesthetic appreciation depends on the capacity to interpret or assess the work before one--but the habits you pick up during several long years in humanities graduate school do tend to breed a little anxiety on this count.

Plus I'm out of practice lately, not having been to an opera in two or three years. So the four-hour running time attached to a work I knew nothing about gave me a tiny bit of pause--just the most fleeting question as to my own staying power and capacity to appreciate what I saw and heard.

Well, this is the Lyric Opera, and I needn't have worried. While the story of Frau is an ornate fairy tale centered on procreation that seemed to me more than a little nuts (though reading Magda Krance's well-informed précis here after the show was a great help in sorting it out), the sheer beauty of the music and the singing made me forget myself, as well as forgetting any anxiety I might have had about appreciating it properly. Deborah Voigt in the lead, a character who is transformed over the course of the opera, was most affecting, particularly in the joy she conveys with real power and yet with tremendous delicacy after she's experienced her sea change. The whole thing, from the great voices assembled on one stage to the achingly beautiful orchestration to the fantastical set and choreography, was enough to make this reluctant operagoer embrace pure, unschooled aesthetic enjoyment again. (And if that isn't enough to convince you, the genuine opera buff who accompanied me found it just as wonderful as I did.)

There are still a few performances of Frau on Lyric's calendar, including one tonight. I'm told it's seldom staged, and even less frequently with an orchestra as fine as the Lyric's--so go to it, Chicago types. Find tickets here.

Posted December 12, 1:09 PM

TT: Sursum corda

I've lived in or near Manhattan for close to a quarter-century, yet there are still moments when I catch myself feeling that the life I lead on the Upper West Side can't possibly be real. I was walking back to my apartment one day last week when that sense of improbability swept over me without warning: how on earth did I end up living half a block from Central Park, reviewing Broadway plays for a living and popping into nightclubs and art galleries between deadlines? At various points along the way, I was sure I was going to be a lawyer, a high-school teacher, a jazz musician, and a psychotherapist, and I fully expected to pursue each of these professions within the borders of the Midwestern state where I was born. Instead I wake each morning, climb down from the cozy loft in which I sleep, turn on a small electronic device that in my youth was unimaginable save to science-fiction writers, and spend the day writing about the arts. I don't live in a house, don't own a car, don't have a lawn to mow, don't know any of my neighbors. I am, in short, a New Yorker, living an unreal life in an unreal city: I love it, but I don't quite believe it.

Later that same day I hailed a cab (a curious thing in and of itself for a small-town boy to do) and went to the Metropolitan Museum, which is directly across Central Park from the street where I live. I went there not to look at paintings but to hear a concert by Chanticleer, the twelve-man San Francisco vocal group that is currently celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. Each December they give a series of Christmastime concerts at the Met, and their president, who is a friend of mine, invited me to come hear them this time around. I accepted her offer weeks ago, long before the stagehands of Broadway went on strike, not knowing that the settling of the strike would force me to spend several nights in a row going to plays and that I would have to attend one of them, Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, on the same night that Chanticleer was singing. I didn't want to miss the concert and couldn't reschedule the play, so I decided to see them both.

I got to the Met at six-fifteen and found a seat in the back of the gallery where the concert was to take place, a huge hall packed with pre-Renaissance European art. A vitrine three feet from my elbow housed an exquisitely wrought oak sculpture of an angel carved in the thirteenth century, around the same time that the first piece on the program, a motet by Perotin, was composed. As I gazed at the angel and listened to the harsh, briny, bracingly angular sounds of "Ex semine Abrahae," two sentences flashed through my mind. One was said by the Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa: "I have no time for any music which does not stimulate pleasure in life, and, even more importantly, pride in life." The other is the terrible line of Thomas Kyd that T.S. Eliot quoted at the end of "The Waste Land": These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

I've been to several of Chanticleer's Christmas concerts at the Met, but the one I remember best is the one I heard six winters ago and wrote about shortly afterward in the Washington Post:

On the Sunday after the World Trade Center crumbled into dust, I flew over the southern tip of Manhattan, transfixed by the insensate spectacle far below me, gaping in dumb wonder at the black hole in my city--my home.

I have been thinking about that terrible day as I look back on the arts in New York in 2001. Somewhat to my surprise, I find it hard to recall what I saw a month ago, much less before September 11. It's as if the hole had been burned not just in the city, but in time itself....

So instead of dwelling on the year's highlights, I've chosen to embrace the present moment and the immediate experience. "One greatly needs beauty when death is so close," old King Arkel sings in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. At last I understand what he meant: I went out nearly every night in December, searching for beauty, and most nights I managed to find some.

I can't imagine anything more purely beautiful, for instance, than Chanticleer singing in the shadow of the Northern European Christmas tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These annual concerts by San Francisco's celebrated all-male chorus have become one of New York's toughest holiday tickets (I overheard somebody complaining that the early show was sold out six months in advance), and now I know why. Take twelve men who sing exquisitely in tune and put them in a biggish room with a high, vaulted ceiling--like a church, but not as boomy--and you get sounds that shimmer and cling like handbells on a chilly day.

My companion that evening was a young woman who had come to New York to seek her fortune as a jazz singer. We met in March and immediately became friends, and in the nervous weeks after 9/11 we went to many concerts together, looking for the comfort that great art can give. Since then my friend has moved to California, but she came back to Manhattan two months ago to sing Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle" at my wedding, and as Chanticleer filled the Medieval Sculpture Hall with the iridescent sounds of Praetorius, Josquin, Arvo Pärt, and Anton Bruckner, I remembered how we'd sat in that same room six years before, wondering what was to become of the city of our dreams.

I slipped out of the hall as the audience applauded "Es ist ein Ros' entsprüngen," collected my coat and shoulder bag from the checkroom, trotted down the front steps to Fifth Avenue, jumped into a cab, and headed for Broadway. Twenty minutes later I was sitting on the aisle of the Booth Theatre, a handsome 1913 building that is, like the Metropolitan Museum, something of a monument to the culture that came under attack on 9/11. The Booth has housed a long list of celebrated shows, among them You Can't Take It With You, The Time of Your Life, Come Back, Little Sheba, A Taste of Honey, The Birthday Party, and Sunday in the Park With George. To date I've reviewed eight plays there, including the 2006 revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer that starred Ralph Fiennes and was directed by Jonathan Kent, who will be staging The Letter for Santa Fe Opera in 2009.

Like Faith Healer, The Seafarer is an Irish play that touches on matters supernatural, and its characters, as I wrote in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, are "frustrated men whose lives have come to naught." But it ends almost happily, which took me very much by surprise. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked after John Kennedy was assassinated, "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't think the world is going to break your heart eventually." Needless to say, you don't have to be Irish to know that, but life without hope is hardly livable, and in a way the most remarkable thing about The Seafarer is that it holds out the prospect--however remote and unsure--of redemption.

As I watched the final scene of The Seafarer unfold before my astonished eyes, I thought once more of what Miklós Rózsa said about the pride in life that art can make us feel. Two hours earlier I had listened with awe to a piece of music written seven hundred years ago, and looked with delight upon a wooden statuette so beautiful that generation upon generation of owners had felt moved to preserve it, until it made its way at last into a great museum, there to be preserved for all time--or until some life-denying madman should find a way to burn down the city that is its home.

Hope, Dr. Johnson tells us, is "a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment." He was wrong about few things, and this was not one of them. Yet I felt the purest, truest kind of hope on the night that I listened to "Ex semine Abrahae," looked at "Angel Holding the Instruments of the Passion," and watched The Seafarer, and though I have no doubt that the world will break my heart a few more times before it is done with me, I find that knowledge--at least for now--unexpectedly easy to bear.

Posted December 12, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Posted December 12, 12:00 AM

December 11, 2007

TT: Film at five-thirty

A cameraman from WCBS-TV is taping me as I type these words.

Here's the backstory: No sooner did I return home from this morning's press conference at Avery Fisher Hall than I got a call from a TV producer who wanted to know if I'd do an on-camera interview about the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea for Channel 2's five-thirty newscast. I said I'd talk to them if (A) they sent the camera crew to my apartment and (B) the interview was wrapped up by three o'clock. (I'm taping a Contentions videoblog this afternoon.) The producer agreed, and an hour later Deborah Garcia was knocking on my door.

Once we'd finished taping the interview, Deborah's cameraman asked if he could shoot what in the TV news business is known as B-roll. He suggested that I walk into my office, sit down at my desk, and spend a minute or two clacking away on my laptop. I decided that it would be way meta if I were to blog on camera, which is what I'm doing.

To see how much of the interview (if any) makes it onto the air, tune into WCBS at 5:30 ET and cross your fingers. If you don't live in or near New York City, you can go here to watch me--or not--in streaming video.

Posted December 11, 2:26 PM

TT: The Philharmonic in Pyongyang

I just got back from a press conference at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall at which the New York Philharmonic officially announced its plans to play in Pyongyang on February 26. Present were Paul Guenther, the orchestra's chairman; Zarin Mehta, the orchestra's president and executive director; and Pak Gil Yon, North Korea's ambassador to the UN. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was also supposed to be at the press conference, but sent his apologies, claiming that "responsibilities" in Washington prevented him from attending.

Highlights:

• The Philharmonic will spend two and a half days in North Korea. During that time it will give a single concert in Pyongyang in a hall seating 1,500 people. It will then fly to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to give a second concert there.

• Lorin Maazel, the orchestra's music director, will conduct both performances.

• The Pyongyang program will consist of Gershwin's An American in Paris and Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, plus the national anthems of the U.S. and North Korea. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony will be played in Seoul.

• According to a statement released earlier this morning, the Philharmonic is making the trip with "the encouragement and support of the U.S. Department of State."

• Paul Guenther said that the orchestra's "somewhat unusual journey" to North Korea would be a reflection of its "calling to serve, which the New York Philharmonic has never shied away from."

• The concert will be broadcast, but as of this morning Zarin Mehta had no information on whether or how it would be heard inside North Korea, or who will be permitted to attend the performance. "I would guess they do not have the kind of system we have of advertising concerts and selling them," he said.

• Fifty members of the international media will accompany the orchestra to Pyongyang. Mehta does not know what restrictions will be placed on them by the North Korean government.

• The orchestra wants to give master classes in Pyongyang for "music students and other professionals," but so far no final arrangements have been made to do so.

• Ambassador Pak dodged the question of whether news of the concert has been released by North Korea's state-controlled media as of this hour.

• Asked whether the concert would be a propaganda coup for North Korea, Mehta replied, "We're not going to do any propaganda."

• More quotes from Mehta:

"One small symphony is a giant leap."

"All we can do is show the way that music can unite people."

"We're going there to create some joy."

* * *

To read "Serenading a Tyrant," my original October 27 Wall Street Journal column on the Philharmonic's trip to Pyongyang, go here.

Posted December 11, 12:11 PM

TT: Cram course

Dear OGIC and CAAF:

As you know, I haven't watched a film in a theater since Capote, and the only new films I saw on TV during that long interregnum were Coeurs, about which more below, and Little Miss Sunshine. (Things were a little hectic!) After I went to a screening of Sweeney Todd last week, I decided that the time had finally come to find out what I'd been missing. To this end, would both of you please be so kind as to post lists of the ten films released since the fall of 2005--current releases included--that you think Mrs. T and I might like best?

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.

For purposes of calibration, the last ten then-new movies I watched with pleasure on a large screen were Bright Young Things, Capote, Collateral, Garden State, The Incredibles, Junebug, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Look at Me, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Sideways.

Over to youse.

Posted December 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Words to the wise

Seeing as how I'm on an Alan Ayckbourn kick, I wanted to let you know that Coeurs, Alain Resnais' 2006 French-language film version of Ayckbourn's Private Fears in Public Places, is showing this week on IFC.

The play, which received its American premiere off Broadway in 2005, is one of Ayckbourn's most important works, and even though Resnais' bittersweet screen adaptation is very French, it's surprisingly faithful to the original and more than worth seeing in its own right. To read what I wrote about it earlier this year, go here.

Six showings are scheduled:

• Tonight at 11:05 p.m. ET

• Wednesday at 5:25 a.m. and 3:05 p.m. ET

• Saturday, December 22, at 11:40 a.m. and 5:05 p.m. ET

• Sunday, December 23, at 4:55 a.m. ET

For more information about Coeurs, or to view the trailer, go here.

Posted December 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids."

Karl Kraus, Beim Word genommen (trans. Harry Zohn)

Posted December 11, 12:00 AM

December 10, 2007

TT: Never a dull moment

I dropped Mrs. T off at the Milwaukee train station a couple of hours ago, then checked my voice mail as I drove to the airport and found out that I had become the Flavor of the Day.

It seems that the New York Philharmonic has definitely decided to perform in North Korea next February, and that the New York Times ran a story this morning in which mention was made of "Serenading a Tyrant," the Wall Street Journal column I wrote in October arguing that this would be a mistake:

Some questions have been raised about the appropriateness of visiting a country run by one of the world's most repressive governments. North Korea's policies have been blamed in part for the famine-related starvation of perhaps two million people and it confines hundreds of thousands of people in labor camps.

If the orchestra goes to Pyongyang, "it will be doing little more than participating in a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime," Terry Teachout, an arts critic and blogger, wrote on the online opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in late October.

Once I got to the airport and checked my e-mail and voice mail, I found a half-dozen increasingly urgent messages from a CNN producer who wanted to know if I could appear on The Situation Room this afternoon to talk about the Philharmonic's planned Pyongyang debut. Alas, it turned out that my flight from Milwaukee to New York had been delayed, so I e-mailed the producer to let her know that I'd be spending the next few hours cooling my heels in a departure lounge. She promptly called me on my cell phone to ask if I'd be willing to do a phone interview instead. Impressed by her persistence, I agreed, went through the security line, made my way to Gate 41, set up shop at a table in a nearby food kiosk, and turned my phone back on. Then I booted up my MacBook, plugged back into the Web, and read an e-mail from a BBC producer wanting to know if I'd do a phoner on the same subject.

As I waited to hear from CNN, I noticed that airports are very noisy places. Had I been giving a performance of John Cage's 4′33″ instead of a phone interview, it would have consisted of the following overheard sounds:

• Get-on-the-plane announcements

• In-the-interests-of-security announcements

• A pair of waitresses discussing their love lives in tones loud enough to shatter glass

• A tableful of men discussing their love lives over pizza

• A wide-ranging medley of kitchen-related noises

• Canned music (Milwaukee favors smooth jazz)

I fired off a e-mail to CNN warning the producer that she might have to do a bit of editing, and she wrote back to reassure me that all would be well. Five minutes later my cell phone rang, and a minute later we were off and running. A correspondent asked me five or six perfectly logical questions, all of which I answered in the manner to which my Wall Street Journal column had accustomed her. Then I e-mailed the producer a photo of myself sitting at a piano, and she told me that the segment would air at five p.m. Eastern. Needless to say, I won't be seeing it--I'll be somewhere over Pennsylvania, I hope--but you're more than welcome to tune in and hear what I had to say.

No sooner did I finish with CNN than I heard back from the BBC producer, who asked me to sit tight while she lined up an interviewer. Ten minutes later I was talking to London.

"Where are you speaking from?" the interviewer asked.

"The airport in Milwaukee," I replied. "I came out here to review an Alan Ayckbourn play." (I figured that would boggle him.)

"And what's the weather like?" he asked, imperturbable to a fault.

"Cold."

Now I have two hours (I hope!) to kill in a strange airport. How shall I spend them? I could start writing about Lincoln Center Theater's production of Cymbeline for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column, put in a bit of work on my Louis Armstrong biography, catch up on my e-mail, or grab some lunch.

Such is a day in the life of a traveling opinionmonger in postmodern America.

Posted December 10, 2:17 PM

TT: Under separate cover

Mrs. T and I are both traveling today, I in a plane and she on a train.

The two of us flew to Wisconsin on Saturday morning to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's production of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, three free-standing full-length plays that share the same characters and take place during the same span of time but are set in different rooms of the same house. For obvious reasons, The Norman Conquests is rarely revived, and this is one of the few major-house stagings to be presented in America since the trilogy was produced on Broadway in the winter of 1975-76. Seeing as how I've become America's Drama Critic faute de mieux, I clearly had to review it, and the fact that I'm an adult convert to Ayckbourn's cause made the assignment all the more urgent.

I had another reason for wanting to go, which is that The Norman Conquests was the first Broadway show I ever saw. Moreover, I saw it--or rather, to be exact, one installment of it--on my very first trip to New York, about which I wrote in City Limits, the memoir I published in 1991:

New York, of course, isn't exactly full of people trying to get to Smalltown, U.S.A., in a hurry, and people from Smalltown aren't much more likely to go to New York, whether for a visit or for good. My father is a rare exception to this rule, for he went to a hardware convention in New York in 1964, returning with a reel of fuzzy home movies of the World's Fair, a plastic Statue of Liberty, and a commitment to never going back about which he has yet to change his mind. I listened to his tales of squalor and rudeness, but the home movies made a deeper impression on me, and I followed in his reluctant footsteps at the age of nineteen. My school, a Southern Baptist college just outside of Kansas City, sponsored a week-long expedition to New York every year, and I signed up as soon as I was eligible. It was a busy week. I haunted the museums. I went to the Metropolitan Opera. I saw my first Nutcracker. But my biggest adventure consisted of going by myself to the early show at the Café Carlyle, neatly dressed in a black suit that my mother and I had picked out at a factory outlet store...

You can read all about my visit to the Carlyle in City Limits, but you can't read anything about The Norman Conquests, for the simple reason that by the time I wrote City Limits I didn't remember anything about it. I don't even know which installment I saw. My first trip to New York had filled my head with so many memories that some of them inevitably got crowded out, and the complicated plot of The Norman Conquests was among the first to go. The only thing of which I'm sure was that I sat on the front row of the Morosco Theatre, which was torn down in 1982 to make way for the mammoth hotel-and-theater complex where The Drowsy Chaperone is now playing. I do remember being surprised by how small the theater seemed--it held a thousand people--and how close I was to Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, whom I knew and loved from a short-lived but wonderful sitcom called He & She that was, alas, a few years ahead of its time.

It was the nearest I'd been to anyone famous, and I topped it a couple of nights later when I sat directly behind Lauren Bacall at an American Ballet Theatre program on which the young Mikhail Baryshnikov danced Spectre of the Rose, an experience that left me permanently star-struck. Small wonder that I moved to New York a decade later, though it never occurred to me that I'd end up becoming the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. Back then I thought I was going to be...what? I wasn't yet sure, but the idea of playing jazz for a living was already starting to take shape in my mind.

Last week I went to the opening night of Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention with a friend who (unlike me) has a knack for picking celebrities out of a crowd. The funny part is that my friend is herself a medium-gauge celebrity, but since she comes, as I do, from unspectacular circumstances, she isn't even slightly blasé about living in New York, and takes the greatest pleasure out of spotting familiar faces.

"Who's here?" I asked her.

She turned around in her seat and scanned the auditorium. "Ah, there's Mike Nichols three rows behind you--no, he's across the aisle. And that's Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas. And over there...Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner!"

I was duly impressed--but not nearly so much as I was in 1975.

Mrs. T and I have been holed up in Milwaukee's InterContinental Hotel, which happens, amazingly enough, to be in the same building as the theater--a great convenience when the temperature outside is well below freezing. You can see a skating rink from the window of our ninth-floor room, which is directly across the street from City Hall, a century-old building of superbly old-fashioned splendor that is now swathed in scaffolding as part of a complete restoration. The hotel itself has changed hands and been redecorated since my last visit. Our room is both very modern and very comfortable, the staff is attentive and friendly in the Midwestern manner, and the food is excellent. We'll come again.

I head back to New York today, but Mrs. T is going in a different direction. By the time you read these words, I'll have dropped her off at the Milwaukee train station, from which she will travel to St. Louis by way of Chicago, and from there by shuttle bus to Smalltown, U.S.A. My mother, who fell and broke her pelvis last month, is being discharged later today from the rehab center where she spent the past couple of weeks learning how to walk again. Hilary and I had originally planned to fly out to Smalltown on December 20 to celebrate Christmas, but when my mother had her accident, Hilary unhesitatingly offered to go there a week and a half early to take care of her. Hence we're going our separate ways this morning, to be reunited in Smalltown ten days from now.

It's strange to think of Mrs. T being in Smalltown without me. We flew there last November on a meet-the-family mission, but we were only able to take a few days off, just long enough for her to show her face and make a (highly favorable) impression. Now she'll be sleeping in the room where I slept when I was a boy, looking through the surviving souvenirs of my youth and drawing whatever conclusions she cares to draw about myself when young. If she wants, she can even snuggle up with Russell and Louise, the stuffed cats that were the treasured companions of my childhood, though I'm afraid she'll find them a bit grubby.

I wish I were there with her, but I'm glad that she's going to have a chance to spend time on her own with my mother, brother, and sister-in-law. As for me, I have two more shows to see and a half-dozen pieces to write before I can turn back around and fly home again. Is home the place where I come from, or the place where Mrs. T is? In ten days I won't have to choose.

* * *

If you remember He & She, this will take you back:

Posted December 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In general, by an odd quirk of nature, the more fond of people I become, the more amusing I tend to find them. Love affairs in my life are matters of considerable hilarity. Necessarily, this has strictly curtailed not only my close circle of friends but my choice of female companions. Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money."

Alan Ayckbourn, preface to The Norman Conquests

Posted December 10, 12:00 AM

December 8, 2007

TT: An all-American bookshelf

Kalima, a United Arab Emirates-based non-profit venture, has just announced plans to translate a very wide-ranging list of foreign books into Arabic and distribute them throughout the Middle East. The inspiration for this idealistic enterprise was a UN report about human development in the Arab world which pointed out that more books are translated into Spanish every year than were translated into Arabic in the whole of the last millennium--an extraordinary and disturbing statistic.

Learning about Kalima inspired me to draw up my own list, a compact boxful of books that I'd send to an Arab (or any other foreigner) who wanted to know what America and its people were like. The list, not surprisingly, became the subject of this week's "Sightings" column.

Which books did I pick? Here's a hint: Willa Cather made the cut. To find out more, pick up a copy of Saturday's Wall Street Journal and turn to my "Sightings" column in the Weekend Journal section.

UPDATE: To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted December 08, 12:00 AM

December 7, 2007

CAAF: Brave new world

Well, Ms. Maud, I'll see your Angela Carter on gentrification and raise you some Donna Tartt on McMansions.

In a hair-raising scene early in The Little Friend, young Harriet and her friend Hely are attempting to capture a poisonous snake. Their hunt for copperheads takes them to Oak Lawn Estates, a newer subdivision of their Mississippi town where all the houses "are less than seven years old: mock Tudor, blocky ranch and contemporary, even a couple of fake antebellums of new, spanking-red brick, with ornamental columns tacked on to their facades." To make way for these outsize, expensive homes, the ground has been razed and plucked of all trees:

But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained--legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring: and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.

And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes--big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared he smell of snake musk to fish guts--buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake's nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes.

Posted December 07, 2:08 PM

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

If you're a Project Runway fan, you'll want to check out Jay McCarroll's recaps of the show for Elle:

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4

The recaps are wonderful -- very, very funny about the show's hoop-de-do (my favorite line: "Marion always looks shipwrecked.") but also smart and constructive about breaking down the fashion going down the runway. The best thing since the launch of Project Rungay.

Posted December 07, 1:30 PM

TT: Broadway's back

I've basically been doing nothing but going to Broadway shows (and Sweeney Todd) and writing about them for the past few days. Today's Wall Street Journal drama column contains the first fruits of my recent theatrical labors. In it I review four shows, three of them new plays that opened on Broadway this week: Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, and a new off-Broadway musical called West Bank, UK. Here's a preview of the column.

* * *

While "The Farnsworth Invention" is as slick as "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," it's also impressively earnest, and its subject is the less-than-burning question of Who Really Invented TV. And you know what? It's good. Not great, you understand, but a rock-solid two-base hit.

The Farnsworth of the title is Philo T. Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson), a small-town science geek who more or less invented electronic TV in his garage, thus running afoul of David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria), the CEO of RCA, whose scientists had been trying without success to do the same thing. Sarnoff thereupon unleashed a pack of high-priced lawyers on Farnsworth in an attempt to seize control of the patents that protected his invention. That sounds suspiciously like a courtroom drama, but instead Mr. Sorkin has written a clever history pageant that juxtaposes Farnsworth's dogged experiments with Sarnoff's meteoric rise through the ranks of corporate America, in the process stuffing a stiff dose of interesting information about the early days of radio and TV down the audience's collective gullet.

Farnsworth and Sarnoff tell one another's stories in "The Farnsworth Invention," an ingenious conceit that keeps the action ping-ponging back and forth between the two characters. Mr. Azaria plays Sarnoff as a tightly coiled tough guy with a sandpaper voice, while Mr. Simpson's Farnsworth is engagingly and believably sincere. Des McAnuff's staging roars along like a high-speed tank, and the other 17 members of the cast, all of whom play multiple roles, put personal spins on even the smallest parts....

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company is performing Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" on Broadway. Mr. Letts' new play is a 13-character, three-and-a-half-hour monster about the Westons, an Oklahoma family so dysfunctional that it's a wonder they're not all dead. Repeat after me: adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest. One of them is even a poet!

No doubt it sounds like Tennessee Williams on a bender, but what makes "August: Osage County" so excitingly watchable is that Mr. Letts has (mostly) chosen to play these grim matters for laughs. The horrific family dinner at which Mom Weston (Deanna Dunagan) pops a double handful of downers and starts settling scores is a glittering piece of black comedy, and the cast, consummately well directed by Anna D. Shapiro, plays it to perfection....

Conor McPherson has given us a Christmas show for the suicidally depressed. "The Seafarer" is one of those capital-I Irish plays whose characters, one of whom (Ciarán Hinds) turns out to be the Divvil Himself, get falling-down drunk, hint broadly that there's more to life than death and spout four- and seven-letter words starting with "f" in rich, peaty brogues. It is also--no fooling--worthy of comparison with the finest work of the young Brian Friel.

Strong words, I know, but the 36-year-old Mr. McPherson has earned them. Like Mr. Letts, he's written a midnight-black comedy, one that wrenches laughter out of the despair of frustrated men whose lives have come to naught....

Oren Safdie ("Private Jokes, Public Places") and songwriter Ronnie Cohen have given the "Avenue Q" treatment to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in "West Bank, UK," a caustically witty four-person musical with a Middle Eastern-flavored score that succeeds in wringing hard-nosed fun out of deadly serious matters. You were expecting maybe a comic duet sung by a pair of suicide bombers? Well, that's what you get--and it works...

* * *

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted December 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Visual footnote

Philo T. Farnsworth--about whom much more above--appeared in 1956 as a guest on the prime-time TV game show I've Got a Secret. Like everything else, that appearance can be found on YouTube. Take a peek if you want to know what got left out of The Farnsworth Invention, then go here to learn still more.

Posted December 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family--and, often, is all that remains of it."

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Posted December 07, 12:00 AM

December 6, 2007

TT: Instant joy

I've been writing like a lunatic all day--well, all week--and decided ten minutes ago that I needed some serious attitude adjustment right now, so I punched up iTunes and went looking for solace.

What did I choose? Miles Davis' 1956 recording of If I Were a Bell, a song from Guys and Dolls that he turns into the hippest, hardest-swinging tune imaginable, aided and abetted by John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. Three snaps of Miles' fingers and the rhythm section eases in with a cool two-beat riff, followed by a tightly muted trumpet playing the theme. Then the Prince of Darkness takes a two-bar break, the rhythm section shifts gears, and all at once everybody's off and running...and I'm smiling. And patting my foot. And wishing (for there is no light without shadow) that I were still a jazz musician so that I could spend my life playing such music. And feeling good again. And looking at the clock to see how long it will be before Mrs. T arrives on my doorstep after a week in Connecticut. And smiling some more.

Life is good. Likewise music. Listen to some.

Posted December 06, 4:02 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town 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)
• Rock 'n' Roll * (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, 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)
• The Glorious Ones (musical, R, extremely bawdy, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)
• Things We Want (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

CHICAGO:
• A Park in Our House (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
• What the Butler Saw (comedy, R, extremely adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• 1776 (musical, G, too complicated for small children, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, completely family-friendly, closes Dec. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN NEW YORK:
• Pygmalion * (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, closes Dec. 16, reviewed here)

Posted December 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"You have to be careful with the intellect as an artist. The intellectual struggles with the facts. That's not inspirational. If you are an intellectual and you are going to buy a house, you would think about the cost, check on the taxes, look at the survey, and go through a whole list of things that make you feel better about buying the house. If you couldn't rationalize it, you wouldn't buy it. If the house genuinely inspired you, you wouldn't worry about the list. You would find a way to buy it. You have to deal with the practical matters, but you wouldn't worry about them because you would be involved with your inspiration. That's what artists have to do. They have to stay involved with their inspiration. They can't be constantly worried about the cost of paint."

Agnes Martin (interviewed in Michael Auping, 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes)

Posted December 06, 12:00 AM

December 5, 2007

OGIC: Thank heaven for little girls

I had to laugh reading Carrie's post last week about a young, precocious reviewer taking Louisa May Alcott to task for, among other sins, this cardinal one:

We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover.

The spectre of some of James's future novels, notably What Maisie Knew, looms a bit smirkingly over this sweeping pronouncement. And the spectre of his yet later preface to the New York edition of Maisie? Pretty much rolling around on the floor in hysterics. It's in the preface that James finds ample good reason to center a story on a little girl, especially of the precocious variety:

My light vessel of consciousness...couldn't be with verisimilitude a rude little boy; since, beyond the fact that little boys are never so 'present,' the sensibility of the female young is indubitably, for early youth, the greater, and my plan would call, on the part of my protagonist, for 'no end' of sensibility...

[Maisie] has the wonderful importance of shedding a light far beyond any reach of her comprehension; of lending to poorer persons and things, by the mere fact of their being involved with her and by the special scale she creates for them, a precious element of dignity. I lose myself, truly, in appreciation of my theme on noting what she does by her 'freshness' for appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough. They become, as she deals with them, the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art; she has simply to wonder, as I say, about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects, solidities, connexions--connexions with the 'universal!'--that they could scarce have hoped for.

I know, I know--not only does this come decades later, but it comes in the thick of James's experiments with point of view, and his enthusiasm is accordingly at least as much for the technical challenge he faced in the novel (and met, if he does say so himself) as for the endlessly rich potential of little girls as subjects for novels. But it's still fun--and fitting--to provide Alcott with a little vindication.

I wrote about Maisie a while back here, noting that the character is a favored Jamesian type: "Small children, working-class men and women, the ill, the dispossessed: when such characters crop up in James, they tend to share this combination of heightened receptivity--a marked capacity for taking things in, for knowing--and an instinctual or strategic disinclination to be known. A form of self-protection, the latter."

Posted December 05, 10:27 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard metal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong."

Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

Posted December 05, 12:07 AM

TT: Almanac

"Art is a conservative power, the strongest of all; it preserves spiritual possibilities that without it--perhaps--would die out."

Thomas Mann, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man

Posted December 05, 12:00 AM

December 4, 2007

CAAF: 5x5 Books In Which Henry James Treads by Michael Gorra

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today's installment comes from critic Michael Gorra. A professor of English at Smith College, Gorra is the editor of The Portable Conrad, out this month from Penguin. Earlier this year, he wrote about Henry James in Florence.

You've read The Master and maybe Author, Author, you cottoned onto Diane Johnson's Isabel in Le Divorce, might even have known that great old Beerbohm parody, "The Mote in the Middle Distance." But James freaks can never quite get enough, and when we get done retelling our favorite anecdotes (most of them cribbed from Edith Wharton's memoirs) we go looking for his figure in the carpet of other people's work. We're so apt to do it, in fact, that there's even a book about it, Adeline Tintner's Henry James Legacy: The Afterlife of his Figure and Fiction. Here are five places to find him.

1. "At The Grave of Henry James" by W.H. Auden. Actually I don't much like this poem, which dates from just after the poet moved to America at the end of the 30s, that low dishonest decade. It has a creaky start, but it ends well, as it asks for forgiveness for the treason of all clerks; HJ was, at the time, famous as the writer who never served a cause outside his art. The grave itself is easy enough to find--he's buried with the rest of his family in the Cambridge municipal cemetery, a slightly bedraggled cousin to the better-groomed Mt. Auburn. Auden saw it covered with snow, and my own first visit was on a bitter January day. I had a cold, and I was so hopped up, or maybe down, on antihistamines that I could hardly drive. But it was worth it.

2. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth. The young Nathan Zuckerman sits up one night in the fifties reading "The Middle Years," the tale of a dying writer who wishes he had a second chance to make his work come right. Roth must be on his third or fourth chance by now, so many revisionary selves has he put himself through. Or maybe its just Zuckerman. And James got that chance as well, in writing his prefaces and revising his work for the New York edition. What's especially good about the Roth is the sense it gives of James' importance to the self-conception of the mid-century American novelist, maybe especially his curious importance to Jewish writers.

3. "Lady Tal" by Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee--as everyone knows--is the pen-name of Violet Paget, an Anglo-Florentine and a childhood friend of John Singer Sargent. She wrote well about Italian art and also produced some genuinely creepy ghost stories. James liked her and admired the depth of her knowledge, but he never forgave her for turning him into a novelist called Jervase Marion--a name he might have used himself! The story is set in Venice, and other characters are recognizable as well. And while it is indeed catty it's also highly readable, quite funny, and probably accurate in its portrait of his various hesitancies. Easiest to find now in Elaine Showalter's anthology, Daughters of the Decadence.

4. Edith Wharton, passim. Which is exactly what one isn't supposed to say these days, except that "Roman Fever" is the best analysis of "Daisy Miller" every written, and The Age of Innocence is all over The Portrait of a Lady. Not just because Wharton's Newland and James' Isabel share the same last name, but because Newland has memories of going dancing in Florence with a rather decayed group of expatriates--did the Countess Gemini try to hit on him? Also he's a member of the Century Club, where if only he were real Newland would in 1875 have met a writer his own age, a young man giving New York one last try before heading off at last to Paris.

5. "Pandora" by--well, by HJ himself. Find this gem in the Library of America edition of his collected stories. A German diplomat comes to America, and on the ship over he both watches an American girl sashay along the deck, and reads a story about the misadventures of another such girl in Switzerland and Rome. Are the real girls like the ones in books, he wonders? Is "Daisy Miller" true? If you like this, you can then pick up W.D. Howells' lovely Indian Summer, a book set in Italy in which the characters criticize each other for not coming up to the tone that reading James has made them expect. It's a typically understated joke by the editor who bought The Portrait of a Lady for the Atlantic.

Posted December 04, 12:01 AM

TT: Almanac

"Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you like a father, even like a lawyer. I'll be hanged if I haven't a certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories on some one who will luminously confirm or powerfully rend them, I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than any other. This is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one that I can make head or tail of."

Max Beerbohm, "Laughter" (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted December 04, 12:00 AM

December 3, 2007

TT: Back on the aisle

Actually, I never left it--I merely shifted my reviewing activities elsewhere, and was more than glad to do so. But within hours of the settlement of the stagehands' strike, three Broadway shows whose first nights had been temporarily scuttled were sending out press releases announcing that they would open their doors this week, just in time for me to work them into Friday's drama column. Since I already had plenty of previously scheduled playgoing on my plate, not to mention a preview of the Sweeney Todd movie, this is what my appointment book looked like as of last Saturday morning:

• SATURDAY Wave goodbye to Mrs. T, who's spending the first part of the week in Connecticut. Work on Louis Armstrong biography all afternoon. Meet The Rat for dinner, then take her to a preview of Lincoln Center Theater's production of Cymbeline, directed by Mark Lamos.

• SUNDAY Two shows, West Bank, UK in the afternoon (accompanied by Lee Ann Westover of the Lascivious Biddies, who sang at my wedding) and Sweeney Todd in the evening (accompanied by Paul Moravec, who just finished writing the music for Scene 6 of The Letter). Go here for details.

• MONDAY Work on Armstrong all day, then head down to Broadway for the opening night of The Farnsworth Invention, Aaron Sorkin's new play, accompanied by the friend who sent me this e-mail back in August.

• TUESDAY Write my "Sightings" column for the Saturday Journal, then return to Broadway for the opening night of August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' new play, which is (gulp) three hours and twenty minutes long.

• WEDNESDAY Start writing Friday's drama column. Tape a Commentary videoblog in the afternoon. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to catch the first part of Chanticleer's annual Christmas concert, then rush over to Broadway for the final preview of The Seafarer, Conor McPherson's new play.

• THURSDAY Finish and file drama column. Collect Mrs. T at the train station. No show tonight. Really.

• FRIDAY Spend day working on the Armstrong biography and writing next week's book column for the Commentary Web site, then escort Mrs. T to the Irish Repertory Theatre for a preview of their new production of George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple.

• SATURDAY To Milwaukee with Mrs. T, there to spend the weekend seeing all three installments of Milwaukee Rep's revival of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests and (if possible) visiting the local art museum, which looks like...well, see for yourself.

• MONDAY Fly back to New York. Climb into a coffin of my native earth. Take the night off.

O.K., I know, it's not exactly ditch-digging, but believe me, folks, that is hard work. And you'll hear about all of it--sporadically. Intermittently. Occasionally. Mostly, though, I'll be leaving the heavy lifting to CAAF and Our Girl, because this is One of Those Weeks.

Thank you, stagehands' union. Thank you, League of Producers. I owe it all to you.

P.S. New Hot Fives and Out of the Past picks! Check 'em out.

Posted December 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

Jane Austen, Emma

Posted December 03, 12:00 AM

December 2, 2007

TT: Attend the tale

I just returned home from the third New York screening of Tim Burton's film version of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, which opens four days before Christmas. The screening was held for the group that Chris Boneau, the publicist, referred to as "the Broadway community," which includes drama critics (John Simon was sitting next to me). It was held at one of the big 42nd Street movie houses, and nearly every seat was full.

I brought along Paul Moravec, with whom I'm collaborating on The Letter. Needless to say, Paul isn't exactly a member of the Broadway community, but he believes, like me, that Sweeney Todd is the great American opera. Moreover, it's one of the works that inspired us to write The Letter. Mrs. T being in Connecticut for the week, I decided that Paul was an appropriate stand-in.

Stephen Sondheim came to the theater to introduce the film, looking like a cat who'd just dined on canary under glass. "For those of you who know the show...forget it," he said. "This is not a film of a musical, it's a movie based on a musical." Then the lights went down and the blood began to flow--or, rather, spurt.

As a member of the working press, I saw tonight's screening under embargo, so I can't say anything specific about Sweeney Todd until it opens in selected cities on December 21. (It opens wide on January 11.) What I can say is that it is--without exception, and by a considerable margin--the best film ever to have been made from a Broadway musical. The only other one to which it can possibly be compared is Bob Fosse's 1972 screen version of Cabaret, and Sweeney is, aside from everything else, a better show. (It is, in my opinion, the best musical to have opened on Broadway since the end of World War II.) I also think it might actually do well at the box office, not to mention the next Oscar night.

Halfway throught he film, in the brief pause between "Epiphany" and "A Little Priest," I leaned over to Paul and whispered, "This is the mark we have to hit." He nodded.

On the street afterward, I said, "Inspiring, huh?"

Paul grinned. "The work waits...and I'm full of joy," he replied. Then he disappeared into the night.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Saying it's the best film ever to be adapted from a Broadway musical feels like faint praise, since almost all these adaptations fail on the musical level (Chicago, One Touch of Venus), on the filmic level (My Fair Lady, West Side Story), or on just about every level (Mame, Phantom of the Opera).

True--as far as it goes. Alas, I can say no more!

Posted December 02, 9:50 PM

December 1, 2007

CD

Posted December 01, 11:27 AM

BOOK

Posted December 01, 10:01 AM

DANCE

Posted December 01, 1:24 AM

BOOK

Posted December 01, 1:16 AM

PLAY

Posted December 01, 1:06 AM

CD

Posted December 01, 12:58 AM