About Last Night: May 2008 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Oh, pity every man who comes hard to the knowledge that underneath his bright, sure consciousness he is not himself but Everyman.

"Fate, I thought. Who is equal to it? For to be equal to fate is to be equal to the knowledge that everything we have achieved, endured and been proud and ashamed of is nothing."

Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

Posted by About Last Night on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reopened Tuesday, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reopened Tuesday, 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)
• Cry-Baby * (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, extended through Aug. 31, reviewed here)
• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through May 18, reviewed here)
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

IN MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, close May 18, reviewed here)

ON TOUR:
• Moby-Dick--Rehearsed (drama, G, not suitable for children, touring the U.S. through May 17, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: I'll call you

Note the time stamp on this posting. I got back from my trip to Santa Fe (about which much, much more later) ten minutes ago, and I slept roughly three hours out of the past forty-eight.

I'm turning off my computer and phone for the next eight hours. Or twelve.

Posted by About Last Night on May 1, 2008 1:59 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Morning coffee

• At MetaxuCafé, a cadre of great contributors are providing ongoing coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival, which continues through Sunday.

• A short film inspired by Leonora Carrington's "The Debutante." In a very modern piece of addenda, there's a note from one of Carrington's grandsons in the comments. Like the Mansfield and Keogh stories I linked to Tuesday, "The Debutante" is another very, very short story about what it's like to be a young girl, though it's the only one of the three to feature a hyena. I smell a bit strong, eh?

If you're not familiar with Carrington, you can start with this profile; and I wrote a little about her amazing novel, The Hearing Trumpet here.

• His novel is still two weeks from publication, and my James Frey fatigue has already set in.

Posted by About Last Night on May 1, 2008 8:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"This was a time in which you were always meeting people who caught politics just as a person catches religion. It was probably the last time in this century when politics in our country will be evangelical, and if a man was once intensely religious, he was bound to be wide open to a mood like that of the Thirties. But why waste time explaining the pattern? It is obvious now, and dozens of books have been written about it. Less obvious have been some of the attendant passions that went along with this neo-religious faith. Passion has a way of spilling over into all aspects of the human mind and feelings. It is the most dangeorus thing in the world whether it focuses itself on love, religion, reform, politics or art. Without it the world would die of dry rot. But though it creates it also destroys. Having seldom been its victim I have only pity for those who are, and I would be a hypocrite if I judged them by the standards you can safely apply to a man at peace with himself and his circumstances."

Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

Posted by About Last Night on May 2, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Bright stars, dim casting

Broadway has entered the home stretch of the 2007-08 season, and opening nights are coming fast and furious. I review three new shows in today's Wall Street Journal column, The Country Girl, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Thurgood. All, alas, proved to be disappointments. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Two of America's best actors opened on Broadway this week in a pair of plays that don't suit their talents. Such disappointments are a necessary part of the career of every serious artist who is brave enough to take chances, but some chances are better than others, and I wish that Morgan Freeman and Laura Linney had chosen more suitable vehicles for their long-awaited returns to the New York stage.

Mr. Freeman, who hasn't set foot on any stage in two decades, is starring in Mike Nichols' revival of "The Country Girl," one of the last plays by Clifford Odets to do well on Broadway. Written in 1950 and most recently revived there 36 years ago, it's best known in George Seaton's 1954 film version, which won Grace Kelly an Oscar, though it was Bing Crosby who gave the more interesting performance. Like Crosby, Mr. Freeman is playing the part of Frank Elgin, an over-the-hill actor-alcoholic who has been given one last chance to redeem himself. It's a challenging role: Elgin starts off scared and ingratiating, then goes on a bender, at last pulling himself together and becoming the man he used to be. The trouble is that Elgin is a weak man, and weakness is not one of the more interesting colors in Mr. Freeman's palette. Once Elgin recovers his courage in the second act, Mr. Freeman snaps into focus and starts making sense, but until then you never quite believe him....

Laura Linney has the twin gifts of simplicity and sincerity: It is impossible to doubt anything she says, whether on screen or onstage. Hence it is hard to see why she would have wanted to play the Marquise de Merteuil, the elaborately deceitful anti-heroine of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Christopher Hampton's "Masterpiece Theatre"-style stage version of Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 epistolary novel about a pair of aristocratic immoralists who make the fatal mistake of putting their heads in a noose of their own knotting. Ms. Linney, doubtless to her credit, lacks the sharp, supercilious edge of hypocrisy without which the Marquise cannot be portrayed convincingly, and though she does all she can to simulate it, the results too often suggest a very, very smart young girl playing dress-up....

Thurgood Marshall was by all accounts a peerless raconteur, full to overflowing of blunt, salty tales about the troubles he'd seen. George Stevens, Jr.'s "Thurgood," in which Laurence Fishburne plays the man who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court, then became its first black justice, shows us that side of him--and nothing more. Like most one-man shows about historical figures, it's a shallow exercise in hagiography: Mr. Stevens' script turns Marshall into a smug, self-satisfied storyteller whom we are invited to admire, and the fact that he did so many admirable things does not make this one-dimensional portrait any more credible, much less dramatic....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 2, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I come to the conclusion that it is a mistake to try to write highly 'poetical' and 'literary' librettos. The poet ought to concentrate entirely on drama and absolute truth to human nature, however unreal or fantastic the story may be; and always to use the very simplest words which everybody can understand at first hearing. Secondly, always to make the characters talk in their own character, and to avoid carefully all temptation to put the author's own private philosophy of life into their mouths. This if properly carried out does not at all prevent the poet's own personality coming through the whole drama, as the great dramatists of the past have shown us. Prospero for instance talks of a good deal of 'philosophy' but it is all within the character of Prospero himself."

Edward J. Dent, letter to Bernard Stevens (June 12, 1950)

Posted by About Last Night on May 5, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: R&R from A to Z

I'd planned to tell you all about my recent trip to Santa Fe today, but the truth is that after flying back to New York by way of Albuquerque, Denver, and Newark, then seeing four new shows in a row, one of them in Brooklyn and two of them very serious, I'm just too damn tired. Besides, I've got to knock out three Wall Street Journal columns between now and Thursday, the first of which is due at noon today if not sooner. So...no posting.

What will I do instead? I'll start by writing Column No. 1, then go have lunch with a friend, after which I propose to spend the rest of the afternoon unwinding by listening to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, which is (as Paul Desmond put it) the musical equivalent of getting your back scratched.

Join me if you like. Al is the one on the left:

Mmmmm.

I promise to file a full and detailed report on my recent operatic adventures as soon as I get myself pulled together again. Meanwhile, it might amuse you to know that some anonymous, exceedingly well-meaning soul has gone to the trouble of writing a Wikipedia entry on The Letter. Take a look!

If that's not enough to keep you busy while I recuperate, go here to read a 1965 interview with Al and Zoot. You might also enjoy this piece by Dave Frishberg, who played piano for them once upon a time:

Zoot and Al were majestic in the way they commanded their horns, and they played rings around that music. They were locked into each other's playing like no other two musicians I ever heard. During their solos they were really composing as they played--they couldn't help it. They were compulsive composers, and it would be totally out of character for either of them to play reflexive licks, or to quote from nursery rhymes or corny pop songs, or to trivialize their music in any way. Jazz critics can probably point to certain "influences" in Al's playing, or Zoot's--Lester Young is the obvious point of departure. But the fire and the swing, and the way they swarmed over the changes and discovered ever fresher and more lyrical ways to navigate them resembles nothing else that came before or followed after.

What he said.

UPDATE: You'll also find me here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 5, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Elaine Dundy, R.I.P.

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, died four days ago. No obituaries as of this hour, but the news is up on her Web site.

It was my privilege to be asked to write an introduction to last year's new edition of The Dud Avocado, published by New York Review Books, and Dundy made it known to me in due course that she liked what I wrote, a fact of which I am very proud.

Here's how it starts:

It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon--Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001--but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.
The Dud Avocado is further handicapped by being funny. Americans like comedy but don't trust it, a fact proved each year when the Oscars are handed out: our national motto seems to be Lord Byron's "Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda-water the day after." To be sure, The Dud Avocado is perfectly serious, but it preaches no sermons, and what it has to say about life must be read between the punch lines. That was what kept Powell under wraps for so long--nobody thought that a writer so amusing could really be any good, especially if she was also a woman--and it has been working against Elaine Dundy ever since she published The Dud Avocado, her first novel, in 1958. I don't think it's a coincidence that The Dud Avocado has never been out of print in England. I'm no Anglophile, but I readily admit that the Brits are better at this sort of thing. Unlike us, they treat their comic novelists right, perhaps because Shakespeare and Jane Austen taught them early on that (as Constant Lambert once observed apropos of the delicious music of Chabrier) "seriousness is not the same as solemnity."

Maud Newton posted the entire introduction here last June. I invite you to read it in lieu of an obituary.

UPDATE: Here's an obit in an unlikely place. I think it would have amused her.

Quiet Bubble has a brief tribute.

TT: Almanac

"I once asked Ben Britten what he thought was the most important requisite in composing opera. I was sure he would say a sense of drama, ability to indicate the meaning of a scene musically in a matter of seconds. What he said was that the most important thing a composer must have is the ability to write many kinds of music--chorus alone, chorus with orchestra, soloists separately, soloists in ensemble, and so on. The needs are so varied that one must have terrific facility to handle them all."

Aaron Copland, Copland Since 1943

Posted by About Last Night on May 6, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Krook go boom

Remember that point in Bleak House when Krook, the drunken rag-and-bone guy, spontaneously combusts in his shop? In my mind I always related the fatal combustion less to Krook's drinking than to his oiliness and the general blackness of his soul, as if he were a one-man grease fire lit by his own evil (as it were).

Then a couple weeks ago, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! had a segment on Prohibition, and one of the questions had to do with the claim of early temperance activists that alcohol consumption could lead to spontaneous combustion, the logic being that alcohol burns.* And I thought, "Krook! Krook!"

Sure enough, that's the folk belief that Dickens drew on to plot Krook's end. Although, according to this website (be warned: there's a spooky photograph there that Will Haunt Your Dreams), Dickens maintained that Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) wasn't superstition but fact:

Krook was a heavy alcoholic, true to the popular belief at the time that SHC was caused by excessive drinking. The novel caused a minor uproar; George Henry Lewes, philosopher and critic, declared that SHC was impossible, and derided Dickens' work as perpetuating an uneducated superstition. Dickens responded to this statement in the preface of the 2nd edition of his work, making it quite clear that he had researched the subject and knew of about thirty cases of SHC. The details of Krook's death in Bleak House were directly modeled on the details of the death of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate by this extraordinary means; the only other case that Dickens actually cites details from is the Nicole Millet account that inspired Dupont's book about 100 years earlier.

Now, you have to consider any Google search that has already delivered the sentence, "Over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of persons burning to a crisp for no apparent reason," as a clear success. But there's more!** The incidents surrounding the death of the Countess are covered in detail here. Meanwhile, the BBC website sheds light on the other case Dickens mentioned in his preface, Nicole Millet's death:

However, the first reliable documentation of SHC dates back to 1763 when Frenchman Jonas Dupont compiled a casebook of SHC cases in a book called De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, having been compelled by the Nicole Millet case, which involved a man who was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court ruled that the unfortunate woman's death had been due to spontaneous combustion.

Nicole Millet was the wife of the landlord of the Lion d'Or in Rheims, who was supposedly found burnt to death in an unburnt chair in February, 1725 (on Whit Monday). Her husband was accused of her murder and arrested; however, a young surgeon named Nicholas le Cat managed to convince the court that her death was caused by SHC. The court ultimately ruled her death as 'by a visitation of God.' However, the investigative author Joe Nickell stated in his book, Secrets of the Supernatural, that Millet's body was not actually found in the chair, but that a portion of her head, several vertebrae and portions of her lower extremities were found on the kitchen floor, the surrounding ground of which had also been burnt. Three accounts were cited: Theodric and John Becks's Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (1835), George Henry Lewes's Spontaneous Combustion from Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine No. 89 (April 1861) and Thomas Stevenson's Principals and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (1883). Strangely, there was no mention of Nicholas le Cat.

Emphasis mine.

* Another rationale for the belief, proferred at the BBC website, is that "a body saturated with such combustible fluids would be prone to combustion at the slightest spark." However, the article continues reassuringly, "the concentration of alcohol in a body would never be high enough for ignition to occur."

** If this post is tending a little ghoulish, my apologies. I spent most of the summer of 1978 (age 7) suffering from a morbid fear/hope that I might spontaneously combust at any moment after my best friend J. brought up the possibility during a sleepover. So, in addition to clarifying all things Krook, this research was psychologically cathartic.

Posted by About Last Night on May 6, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Half a loaf

Doing nothing no longer comes naturally to me, but I gave it my best shot yesterday. To be sure, I didn't spend the whole day doing nothing. I couldn't--I had a deadline to hit. I got up at seven, wrote and filed my Wall Street Journal drama column, answered my e-mail, and took note of the death of Elaine Dundy. But by noon I was through with the day's work, so I put on my clothes (yes, I write in dishabille) and strolled over to Columbus Avenue. I caught a cab and told the driver to take me to Danal, where my old friend Rick Brookhiser stood me to a champagne luncheon in honor of the completion of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

"So, what are the first and last words of the book?" Rick asked.

"Ah, the Jane Chord!" I replied.

The Jane Chord, to which Bill Buckley introduced us years ago, is a concept originally promulgated by Hugh Kenner. The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver--the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built--and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it's still a good game to play.

It had been ages since I'd last struck a Jane Chord, but no sooner did Rick remind me of the rules than I started racking my memory to see if I could recall the chord for Rhythm Man. A moment later I came up with the first and last sentences of the book, and I let out a whoop of delight as I realized that I'd unconsciously put together a humdinger: New/whole.

After lunch I came straight home, curled up on the couch, and spent the next couple of hours listening to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and rereading Doug Ramsey's Paul Desmond biography, at which I hadn't looked since I reviewed it for the Journal three years ago:

You may not know Paul Desmond's name, but you've almost certainly heard his music. He wrote "Take Five," a sinuous minor-key tune in the once-exotic time signature of 5/4 (marches are in 2/4, waltzes in 3/4, pop songs in 4/4) that was recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. It shot up the charts a year and a half later, becoming the first jazz instrumental to sell a million copies.
In addition to making its composer rich, "Take Five" also introduced the public at large to the inimitable sound of Desmond's cool-toned, unsentimentally lyrical alto saxophone playing, which he aptly described as the musical equivalent of a dry martini. In part because of the unexpected popularity of "Take Five," Brubeck and Desmond became the most famous jazz musicians of the '60s, and "Time Out," from which the song was drawn, remains to this day one of jazz's top-selling albums.

As if being rich and famous weren't enough, Desmond was also a talented writer of prose (usually in the form of wryly witty liner notes for his solo albums), a preternaturally successful ladies' man (he preferred fashion models, though he made an exception for the young Gloria Steinem) and a seemingly inexhaustible bon vivant (Elaine's was his after-hours hangout of choice). He also managed to consume far more than his lifetime quota of cigarettes, alcohol and other, more strictly controlled substances, the combined effect of which presumably contributed to his death from lung cancer in 1977. His friends have been telling tales out of school about him ever since, and one of his closest companions, the jazz critic Doug Ramsey, has now woven the best ones into a biography.

While "Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond" contains plenty of show-stopping gossip, it is in no way a pathography. Scrupulously researched and written with an attractive combination of affection and candor, it casts a bright light on Desmond's troubled psyche without devaluing his considerable achievements as an artist. "Any of the great composers of melodies--Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin--would have been gratified to have written what Desmond created spontaneously," Mr. Ramsey says. Strong words, but "Take Five" makes them stick.

I got so comfy that instead of going out for dinner, I stayed home, ordered a pizza, and watched a movie. I chose Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, which I hadn't seen since shortly after I wrote about it in the New York Times in 1997, back in the long-lost days of innocence when I had only just crossed the fortieth meridian (Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?). It's very much a young man's film, and the denouement still doesn't quite parse, but I was pleased to see how well the performances and the rest of the script have held up, and it felt downright luxurious to be able to watch a plot unfold without having to think about how to boil it down into a one-paragraph synopsis.

Watching Chasing Amy put me in mind of the brief gaudy hour when sharp-witted indie and indieish flicks like Clerks, Election, Ghost World, Kicking and Screaming, Living in Oblivion, Metropolitan, Next Stop Wonderland, Panic, Pi, Swingers, and You Can Count on Me seemed to be coming out every month or so. Back then I was writing about movies regularly, and I went so far as to predict in 1999 that the independent film was the wave of the narrative future:

Americans under thirty are habituated to the characteristic narrative style of film--it is far more familiar to them than that of prose fiction--and many talented young American storytellers who once might have chosen to write novels are instead making small-scale movies of considerable artistic merit....it is only a matter of time before similar films are routinely released directly to videocassette and marketed like books (or made available in downloadable form over the Internet), thus circumventing the current blockbuster-driven system of film distribution. Once that happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the twenty-first century.

I made that bold prophecy in The Wall Street Journal, then included it in A Terry Teachout Reader five years later. And what happened? I became a drama critic--and I've seen exactly two movies in a theater since the fall of 2005. So much for my prescience.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed my nostalgic wallow so much that I briefly considered watching another movie, but in the end I decided not to press my luck. For once I'm going to bed early, I told myself. So I called Mrs. T in Connecticut, then turned off the lights and clambered up the ladder to my loft, feeling as contented as it's possible for me to feel when she's there and I'm here.

Now what? Well, I've got another Journal column to write this morning, but once it's done I'm finished until tomorrow. A walk in Central Park? An afternoon nap? The Metropolitan Museum? More Al and Zoot? Call me irresponsible! Why didn't anybody ever tell me that it's fun to do nothing?

Posted by About Last Night on May 6, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: MIA

Still no Elaine Dundy obituary in the New York Times--or any other newspaper, so far as I know. Don't these people read blogs? Or books published prior to 1995? Or anything?

Posted by About Last Night on May 6, 2008 10:29 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

INTERVIEWER: You've said that one of the things you like about theater is that it's a collaborative art and that you in a sense have a family. Again, to the layperson, it's amazing, with all those people involved, that a musical ever gets on. In your experience as a collaborator in the process, when it works, what makes it successful?

SONDHEIM: The answer is so obvious that it will not seem like an answer. You have to be sure that you're writing the same show. That's something that I didn't discover about [A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum] until too late. We weren't writing the same show, even after we'd spent the better part of four years on it. They were writing a certain kind of show, and I was writing a certain kind of score, and none of us recognized that they were slightly different. I learned from that, and so the preliminary discussions for any show I do with my collaborators are to be sure that we're writing the same show. That's what makes it work.

Stephen Sondheim (quoted in Jackson R. Bryer and Richard A. Davison, The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators)

Posted by About Last Night on May 7, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: MIA (cont'd)

At last, an Elaine Dundy obit--from England. (Arrgh.)

Posted by About Last Night on May 7, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Air Farce One

The Broadway season ends tomorrow, and the openings have been coming so fast and furious in recent days that I've been forced to double up on this week's Wall Street Journal drama columns. In today's paper I review two very different shows, the Broadway revival of Boeing-Boeing and BAM Harvey's production of Endgame. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Let us now praise farce, the most ruthless form of comedy, in which a hubristically self-satisfied character (usually male) is faced with the prospect of imminent humiliation (usually sexual) and does all he can to avoid it, thereby making matters worse. I love farce, but for some reason New York producers steer clear of it, and it's been some years since a slamming-door farce last played on Broadway. Now the drought is over: "Boeing-Boeing," which was a hit in London last year, has crossed the Atlantic in time for this year's Tony nominations, of which it will surely receive a hatful.

"Boeing-Boeing" is a seven-door farce set in the Paris bachelor pad of Bernard (Bradley Whitford), a businessman with three fiancées, all of them stewardessses. They're never in town at the same time, which permits him to bed them seriatim. This being a farce, such well-laid plans are naturally predestined to collapse into a heap of smoking rubble. The dégringolade begins when Bernard's mousy buddy Robert (Mark Rylance) drops by for a visit just as Fiancée No. 1, a cheerfully promiscuous New Yorker named Gloria (Kathryn Hahn), departs through Door No. 4, making way for Fiancée No. 2, a jealous Italian babe named Gabriella (Gina Gershon). Then Fiancée No. 3, a German giantess named Gretchen (Mary McCormack), shows up--her plane landed early--and within mere minutes things are way, way, way out of hand.

The plot of "Boeing-Boeing" is a skein of silliness and the characters ethnic cartoons, meaning that the show must be flawlessly cast and directed with ultra-finicky timing in order to work. The good news--make that great news--is that these conditions are seen and raised in Matthew Warchus' staging. Top honors go to Mr. Rylance, a Shakespearean actor-director whose lunatic performance as Robert startled the hell out of the London critics. Imagine (if you can) a balding, adenoidal milksop with mismatched eyebrows who strolls into Bernard's ménage à quatre, sees what he's been missing and decides that the time has come for him to embrace the more abundant sexual life....

The last time I saw "Endgame," 9/11 loomed three years nearer in the rear-view mirror, which added an extra twist of relevance to Samuel Beckett's post-apocalyptic 1957 comedy about four people who appear to be all alone in what is left of the world. I use the term "comedy" loosely, but much of "Endgame" really is supposed to be laughable--if grimly so--which is what gives the play its mordant punch.

Rightly or wrongly, though, New Yorkers are feeling rather less anxious these days, and I wonder whether that might explain why I found BAM Harvey's star-studded new production of "Endgame" to be somewhat less compelling than the potent revival mounted by the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2005. Or perhaps the play itself isn't quite as good as I once thought it was. Nobody ever accused Beckett of being obvious, but "Endgame," much to my surprise, now seems to me to border on heavy-handedness in its portrayal of the dark encounter that awaits us all...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 7, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You know, I've been thinking an awful lot about you and me. I love you with my whole being, solemnly and seriously. These last times have made me realise how serious love is, what a great responsibility and what a sharing of personalities--it's not just a pleasure & a self indulgence. Our love must be complete and a creation in itself, a gift which we must be fully conscious of & responsible for."

Peter Pears, letter to Benjamin Britten (c. December 1942)

Posted by About Last Night on May 8, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: MIA (III)

Finally, a major American newspaper has run an obituary of Elaine Dundy--and guess where it is? In Los Angeles. Another raspberry to the New York Times!

I note with pleasure the following paragraph about The Dud Avocado:

When the book was reissued last year in the New York Review Books classics series, critic Terry Teachout described Sally Jay as the "spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones," a characterization that Dundy relished.

I'm glad to know that.

Posted by About Last Night on May 8, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)
• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, closes May 18, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on May 8, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I did deeply want to create, by means both austere and rich--means always disciplined by a central aesthetic--an experience that was entirely and only theatrical."

Peter Shaffer, preface to The Royal Hunt of the Sun (courtesy of Marissabidilla)

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The all-American choreographer

Jerome Robbins is all over the place these days. New York City Ballet is presenting a month-long Robbins Celebration at Lincoln Center, while Patti LuPone is burning up the stage of the St. James Theatre in an Arthur Laurents-staged revival of Gypsy that incorporates the dances choreographed by Robbins for the show's original 1959 production.

The coincidence of these two events struck me as a highly suitable occasion for a "Sightings" column in which I take a retrospective look at Jerome Robbins' place in postwar American culture. During his lifetime, Robbins was America's most famous choreographer--but ten years after his death, does the co-creator of Fancy Free, West Side Story, and Dances at a Gathering still matter? Or has the ever-changing Zeitgeist finally passed him by?

To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Wall Street Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and see what I have to say in "Sightings."

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Seven girls grumbling

The 2007-08 Broadway season is now officially over, and in today's Wall Street Journal column I report on the last show to open in time for this year's Tony nominations, Top Girls. I didn't think much of it.

I also had a few words to say about Glory Days, the sensitive-teen musical that opened--and closed--on Tuesday.

Here's an excerpt.

* * *

I can't tell you how "Top Girls" looked in 1983, but today it is a creaky period piece, by turns clever-clever and brutally heavy-handed, in which Ms. Churchill strenuously endeavors to portray the upwardly mobile career women of the Thatcher era as bitchy, self-hating beasts who have fallen victim to the virus of American individualism and so lost their souls. Marlene (Elizabeth Marvel), the head of the bitch pack, runs an employment agency that finds high-paying jobs for monsters of ambition. In due course we learn that she has deserted her working-class family--and her illegitimate daughter--in order to come to London to shinny up the greasy pole. At play's end she visits her home in Suffolk, where her sister (Marisa Tomei) spits venom in her eye: "I suppose you'd have liked Hitler if he was a woman. Ms. Hitler. Got a lot done, Hitlerina." No doubt Ms. Churchill meant for us to be stunned into agreement by the pungency of this assault on the evils of Thatcherism, but all it did was make me look at my watch....

Many Broadway shows have closed after just one night, but only a few have been musicals. The last new musical to explode as soon as the key was turned was Alan Jay Lerner's "Dance a Little Closer" in 1983. Thus "Glory Days" has won itself a place in history: Henceforth it will be mentioned alongside such famous flops as Leonard Bernstein's "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" (seven performances), Mickey Leonard's "The Yearling" (four performances), Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle" (nine performances) and "Merrily We Roll Along" (16 performances), Charles Strouse's "Nick & Nora" (nine performances) and Jule Styne's "The Red Shoes" (five performances).

What all these older flops have in common is that, like "Dance a Little Closer," they were the work of distinguished artists, and some had memorable scores to boot. "The Yearling" actually yielded up a standard, "I'm All Smiles," while "Anyone Can Whistle" and "Merrily We Roll Along" have both turned out to be much hardier than they looked at first glance. As for Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner, the authors of "Glory Days," they are 23 and 24 years old respectively, young enough to someday earn themselves a second grab at the brass ring of theatrical success. Stranger things have happened: Six years after "Anyone Can Whistle" blew up in Mr. Sondheim's face, he wrote "Company" and became immortal. So I'll keep my opinion of "Glory Days" to myself and instead wish its makers the best of luck in their future endeavors. They'll need it, and maybe they'll get it.

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

BOOK

William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories (Library of America, $35). How did I fail to laud this collection when it came out earlier this year? Too busy, I guess, but it's never too late to sing the praises of Maxwell, a legendary New Yorker fiction editor who doubled as one of this country's most remarkable and least appreciated novelists. The Folded Leaf, written in 1945 and included in this collection, is the place to start, a deeply intelligent tale of adolescence angst that avoids all the pitfalls common to that genre. Also included is "The Writer as Illusionist," a 1955 essay in which Maxwell discussed his soft-spoken art with characteristic acuteness (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:08 PM | Permalink

CD

Hilary Hahn, Schoenberg/Sibelius Violin Concertos (DGG). America's best young classical violinist has taken on a real nutcracker this time around: Arnold Schoenberg's 1936 concerto, a finger-twistingly hard piece of twelve-tone neoromanticism that sounds like Brahms gone bonkers. Even if you don't buy Schoenberg's music--which I don't--you'll find this specimen perversely fascinating, and Hahn has taken out a gilt-edged accident insurance policy by coupling it with Sibelius' ever-popular D Minor Concerto. Needless to say, the violin playing is fabulous, and Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra provide immaculate support (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:09 PM | Permalink

PLAY

Boeing-Boeing (Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48). Bliss comes to Broadway in the unlikely form of a half-remembered French comedy that crashed and burned when it last played the Great White Way in 1965. Marc Camoletti's seven-door farce, in which two hapless bachelors juggle three sexy stewardesses and a haughty Parisian maid, is feather-light, totally dated, utterly irrelevant, and rib-crackingly funny, in large part because of the brilliant performances of Mark Rylance and Christine Baranski. Give your brain a night off and do some serious laughing (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:09 PM | Permalink

FILM

The Westerner. Gary Cooper has been largely overlooked by postmodern film buffs, but a new DVD reissue of this 1940 film might help break through the wall of silence. Directed by William Wyler, The Westerner is a fictionalized retelling of the not-entirely-legendary tale of Roy Bean, the hard-drinking self-made Texas judge who dispensed Law West of the Pecos and had a thing for Lillie Langtry, the celebrated turn-of-the-century British actress. Walter Brennan won and earned an Oscar for his scene-stealing performance as Judge Bean, but Cooper gets plenty of licks in as a dryly amusing drifter who slips out of the judge's noose by falsely claiming to know the Jersey Lily. Hijinks ensue, climaxing in a spectacular showdown. You'll know who wins well before the first shot is fired, but all the fun is getting there. Gorgeous cinematography by Gregg "Citizen Kane" Toland (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 9, 2008 12:30 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it."

Gustave Flaubert, Pensées

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: MIA (concluded)

It took long enough and then some, but Elaine Dundy finally made it onto the obituary page of the New York Times last Friday. Kindly note the last paragraph:

The Dud Avocado, reissued last year by The New York Review of Books, remains Ms. Dundy's most popular book, flawed but vital, like its heroine. "The plot is helter-skelter, and the end trails off into vapor," the critic Terry Teachout wrote, "but the narrator's utterly feminine voice redeems all."

Sure enough.

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Right turn at Albuquerque

SIDE%20VIEW%20OF%20OPERA%20HOUSE.jpg "When I know how long a piece must take, then it excites me," Igor Stravinsky said to George Balanchine. That's sort of how I felt when I finally got a look at the stage on which the Santa Fe Opera will give The Letter its first performance next July.

The Crosby Theater is a 2,166-seat open-air house built atop a 7,500-foot-high desert mesa. Here's how the construction company that built the theater describes it:

The most unique feature of the project is the enormous, and very complex, steel roof structure. The roof rod tensioning system and huge mast assemblies support the roof structure and balcony steel, with the roof connected in tension, and resting on the four existing star columns.
The opera seating is a concrete riser on grade and the balcony seating is a pre-cast riser set on structural steel. The architectural finish is the traditional New Mexican stucco. Special systems that were added include a state-of-the-art theatrical lighting system running throughout 750 lineal feet of catwalk erected above the stage, and computerized dimming capabilities both within the theater and throughout the plaza grounds.

DURING%20A%20PERFORMANCE.jpg All this is true enough, I suppose, but only in the limited sense that it would also be true to describe the Empire State Building as rather tall. It's more to the point, if less exact, to say that the Crosby Theater is the most gorgeous-looking open-air theater I've seen in my life--and I've seen some beauties. The setting is part of it, of course, but the theater itself is a humdinger, at once spacious and arrestingly intimate. Now that I'm a drama critic, I spend much of my time watching performances in small theaters, and in the process I've become impatient with giant-sized auditoriums like the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, where even the best seats are far removed from the singers on stage. Not so the Crosby Theater. When you stand on the stage, you feel as though you're in the lap of the audience, and when you sit in the orchestra seats, you feel as though you're being thrust toward the performers.

To build such a theater in so naturally beautiful a place all but ensures a festive atmosphere, and by most accounts the opera buffs who come to Santa Fe do so in the expectation of having a rip-roaringly good time:

I learned these things when I flew out to Santa Fe two weeks ago to attend the press conference at which the cast and production team of The Letter were announced. I'd never been to Santa Fe before, and didn't know how complicated it is to get there from New York: you fly into Dallas or Denver, change planes for Albuquerque, then spend an hour driving to Santa Fe. The connections can be dicey, and if you try to cut it close, you're likely to end up spending the night somewhere else. I flew out of Newark, and my flight left two hours late, the same amount of time I'd allowed myself to change planes in Dallas. Since I was booked onto the last flight to Albuquerque, I assumed that I wasn't going to get to Santa Fe until the next day, but American Airlines, God bless them, held my plane, and I made it to New Mexico in one piece, more or less on time.

STAGE%20%28DAYTIME%2C%20NO%20SET%29.jpg Paul Moravec, my collaborator on The Letter, picked me up at my hotel the following morning and drove me to the opera house, where the company's production chief gave us a tour of the grounds. The more I saw, the bigger my eyes grew. Of course I knew perfectly well that Santa Fe Opera is a large-scale operation, but you can't fully appreciate the implications of that statement until you see the company's headquarters spread out before you. As I explained to Mrs. T when I got back to New York, Santa Fe Opera is not so much a summer opera company as a major opera company that performs in the summer. Paul told me this after he went there last year--he compared it to Bayreuth--but it wasn't until I stood on the stage that I understood what he meant.

Paul and I did our best to act like grownups, but as soon as the tour was over and the production chief left us to ourselves, we looked at one other and broke out in mile-wide grins.

"Is this cool or what?" Paul said.

"Dude," I replied, "we have soooo hit the big time!"

Then we started laughing uncontrollably.

PRESS%20CONFERENCE.jpg Once we got ourselves pulled together, we strolled over to the rehearsal hall. We had an hour to kill before the press conference, so Paul found a piano and played through his preliminary sketches for the last scene of The Letter. At length the reporters started drifting in, and we closed the piano and made ready to be introduced to the world. What followed was later described on the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican under the wonderful headline "Opera's 2009 Season Takes Film Noir Turn":

The Santa Fe Opera announced Wednesday that its 2009 season will include the world premiere of The Letter, an opera based on a 1927 stage adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham short story.
The SFO commissioned the opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and critic, biographer and blogger Terry Teachout.

Tom Ford, fashion designer and legendary former creative director of Gucci, whose new house atop Talaya Hill is still under construction, is making his debut as a costume designer for The Letter.

The 90-minute opera in eight scenes has "blood and sex, everything you want in opera," Teachout said.

Patricia Racette and Anthony Michaels-Moore star as an unhappy couple whose life in the jungle of Malaya is torn apart by adultery that leads to murder, blackmail and revenge.

Moravec said he and Teachout intend the opera to be as "fast, concise and hard-hitting as a film noir."

The characters in the opera are more likely to be wearing khaki or white duck suits (including one soaked in blood) than Ford's signature cowboy boots, blazers, unbuttoned shirts (and 5-o'clock shadows). But, Moravec said, "anything Tom Ford wants to do is fine with us as long as the labels aren't showing."

Read the whole thing here--there's lots more, all of it accurate, including the quotes.

When the show was over, I wolfed down lunch, then headed back to New York by way of Albuquerque, Denver, and Newark. Paul stayed behind to work on the last scene and confer with Richard Gaddes, the company's outgoing general manager, and Charles MacKay, who will be replacing him this fall. I would have liked to stay on for a few more days, too, but I had four shows to see on Broadway and no time to spare, so I left with the utmost reluctance.

The good news is that I'll be returning to Santa Fe in July to spend a week seeing four of this season's productions (one of them staged by Jonathan Kent, who is directing The Letter) and meeting with more of the people with whom we'll be working next year. I can't wait. Paul and I have been thinking about The Letter for the better part of two years, but now, at long last, it seems absolutely real to us--and we're excited. Very, very excited.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

You said "Dude"? For realsies?

Way.

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Conjugal leave

Now that Rhythm Man is finished and the Broadway season is over, I'm blowing town for a few days of much-needed rest. Tonight I'll be dining with Mrs. T somewhere in deepest Connecticut, and anybody who wants to get in touch with me there for any reason not involving a four-figure advance cash payment is out of luck.

Blogging? Fugedaboudit. Except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings, I intend to leave you in the hands of OGIC and CAAF all week long. If I break my word, throw stones.

See you next Monday.

P.S. I've freshened the Top Five and "Out of the Past" picks, and my colleagues will be adding still more new stuff this week. Take a peek.

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Morning coffee

This is the world we made edition:

• Virginia Heffernan reports that the Oxford English Dictionary may soon be out of print as it moves to a web-only format. Luddites cry, "O.E.D. no!" Relatedly, in this week's Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond explores how Wikipedia's dominance is affecting the publishing model for encyclopedias and other reference works.

• Janet Maslin gives James Frey's new novel a rave. But the review is written in a bad James Frey imitation. Which made this reader squirm, cringe.

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 10:34 AM | Permalink

TT: Another envelope, please

The New York Drama Critics' Circle made its annual awards today. The best-play award went to August: Osage County, the best-musical award to Passing Strange.

To find out how all the judges voted, myself included, go here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 12, 2008 8:24 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart."

Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Posted by About Last Night on May 13, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: 5 x 5 Books Beloved Books I Fear Re-reading by Mark Sarvas

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today's installment comes from my friend Mark Sarvas, proprietor of The Elegant Variation and author of the new novel Harry, Revised. New York magazine gave Harry a thumbs up, praising the author's "sure hand for vivisecting 21st-century absurdities." New York readers can catch Mark when he reads tomorrow night -- that's Wednesday! -- at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca (more info).

Here Mark shares five beloved books he's afraid to re-read for fear they won't hold up.

1. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck's legacy hasn't held up particularly well. Robert Gottlieb just took several thousand words in the New York Review of Books to bury him, not to praise him. "The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck," he began, "is how good he can be when so much of the time he's so bad." I have fond memories of Of Mice and Men, one of the first "serious" literary works I read at a young age. Besides being proud of myself for my leaps in reading comprehension, I was completely drawn in by Lenny, George and those damned rabbits. I cried for hours when I finished the book but felt I had glimpsed something about friendship that was rare and true. But I've had my own love/hate with Steinbeck since -- I think he's better than Gottlieb allows but he can frequently be astonishingly ham-fisted. So I think I'm going to leave this one untouched in the well of memory.

2. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I've read this one well over a dozen times but not in the last ten years or so. Rob Reiner famously did a fine job, but, for me as for many others, he simply could not compete with the Inigo and Fezzik of my own memory. Of course, in my first youthful reading, I didn't realize Goldman was funning with us with all that Florin/Guilder stuff -- until I went to Holland and handled actual florins and guilders. My fear here is all the stuff I thought was cool before -- the breaking of the fourth wall, the book within the book stuff -- is likely to just read like bits of business now and, knowing Goldman, the emotion I found back then would probably come off as mawkishness today. It's another one I daren't touch, though the hard-cover reissue sits proudly on the shelf.

3. The Tanglewood Murder by Lucille Kallen. Although I seem to have a reputation as an anti-genre snob, I retain very fond memories of this whodunit written by a former "Your Show of Shows" writer, who died in 1999. I actually enjoyed the whole C.B. Greenfield series so much that I had her sign first editions of all her books years ago at Murder Ink, the now-defunct New York mystery bookstore. But this one was always my favorite, and I'd picked up a paperback copy on my way up to Tanglewood one summer with my family. The mystery includes a Stradivarius, Ravel and Shakespeare and is forever associated in my mind with those summer evenings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- and I tend to be suspicious of reading experiences too steeped in nostalgia. But I do remember it as a witty and surprising mystery.

4. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Like most of the free world, I was completely blown away when I read White Teeth, and the initial first flurry of pages I wrote of my own novel came out in a sort of Zadie Smith-soaked haze. (Those pages, thankfully, no longer exist.) What I admired most was her sheer fearlessness -- no turn of phrase seemed to outrageous, no outré scenario off limits, and yet she had the chops to pull them all off -- or so it seemed at the time. Those are precisely the bits I fear might not read as well today. Smith herself has disavowed the book, characterizing it as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old," and though I think she goes overboard there, her prose has matured and quieted down in a way that fulfills the promise of her debut without making me eager to revisit it.

5. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I mentioned this "5 x 5" idea last week to a novelist friend, who immediately piped up with The English Patient, a book which wasn't in my original list but one she had recently re-read. But she was so convincing in her case, suggesting that what I fondly remember as the book's lush lyricism read to her as overripe, and that the absence of the plot that I swear I remember being there adds up to a book that's a lovely slog. I trust and respect her enough that I'm suddenly terrified to crack this one open.

Posted by About Last Night on May 13, 2008 12:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Posted by About Last Night on May 14, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The unsurprising Tonys

This year's Tony Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, and The Wall Street Journal asked me to comment on them in this morning's paper:

The nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards were announced yesterday morning. They weren't surprising. They almost never are. Take, for instance, the Best Musical category. Eight new musicals opened on Broadway this season, and one of them, "Glory Days," closed after a single performance. "A Catered Affair," "Cry-Baby," "The Little Mermaid" and "Young Frankenstein" got sharply mixed reviews, leaving "In the Heights," "Passing Strange" and "Xanadu," all of which received nominations, with "Cry-Baby" thrown in to fill the obligatory fourth slot. That's about as exciting as ordering a Big Mac and waiting breathlessly to see if it contains an extra pickle....
The Tony nominations, in short, have become an exercise in ratifying the obvious--and how could they be anything else? Broadway consists of 39 houses, four of which are run by Lincoln Center Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre Company, a trio of non-profit outfits that are marginally more adventurous than their commercial counterparts. As for the remaining 35, they're so costly to operate that anyone who dares to bring a new show into one of them is all but begging to throw his money away. That's why today's theatrical producers usually play it very, very safe, importing road-tested productions that have been developed by out-of-town companies. The days when an unknown author could hope to take Broadway by storm are over.

All this explains why the Tonys have grown so lackluster in recent years: Their unsurprising nature merely reflects the safety-first institutional culture of Broadway....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 14, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: So eternally Green

There's a lot that's amazing about Henry Green's novel Loving, which I continue to read in small doses. I pick it up infrequently enough that my grasp of many plot points is less than firm, but no matter. The draw is Green's minute observation and inimitable style. Rendering the teeming emotional and social life below stairs on an Irish estate during the second world war, Green goes right to the verge of sensuous overload in his impressionistic descriptions but pulls back in his plainspoken, practical dialogue. In a way his characters' talk functions itself as description or atmosphere--doggedly true to the way he heard people talk, it's not meant to explain anything and in fact often serves to obfuscate the matter.

In this terribly moving small vignette from the novel, I'm interested in how colors run a little wild. To say they have symbolic weight is an understatement; more than symbolic, they're active players in the miniature drama that plays out here, seeming to struggle with each other for supremacy over the mood of the scene and ergo its outcome.

Edith feared for Raunce's neck. She said those draughts in the servant's hall might harm him. Now coal was so short it was only a small peat fire she could lay each morning in the butler's room, and she insisted that the grate Raunce had was too narrow for peat. This no doubt could be her excuse to get him to take his cup along with her to one of the living rooms where huge fires were kept stoked all day to condition the old masters.
So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce's heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed french windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith's curls a trifle. Between the books the walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought to the draught.

"You ever noticed that little place this side of the East Gate?" he was asking.

"Well can't say I've looked over it if that's what you're after," she replied. He hooked a finger into the bandage round his throat as though to ease himself.

"Next time you pass that way you have a look, see."

"Why Charley?"

"It's empty that's why."

"It's empty is it?" she echoed dull but with a sharp glance.

"The married butlers used to live there at one time," he explained. Then he lied. "Yesterday mornin'," he went on canny, "Michael stopped me as he came out of the kitchen. You'll never guess what he was onto."

"Not something for one of his family again?" she enquired.

"That's right," he said. "It was only he's goin' to ask Mrs. T. for it when she gets back, that's all. The roof of their pig sty of a hovel 'as gone an' fallen on 'is blessed sister-in-law's head and's crushed a finger of one of their kids."

"The cheek," she exclaimed.

"A horrid liar the man is," Charley commented. "But it's not the truth that matters. It's what's believed," he added.

"You think she'll credit such a tale?" Edith wanted to know.

"Now love," he began then paused. He was dressed in black trousers and a stiff shirt with no jacket, the only colour being in his footman's livery waistcoat of pink and white stripes. He wore no collar on account of his neck. Lying back he squinted into the blushing rose of that huge turf fire as it glowed, his bluer eye azure on which was a crescent rose reflection. "Love," he went on toneless, "what about you an' me getting married? There I've said it."

"That's want thinking over Charley," she replied at once. Her eyes left his face and with what seemed a quadrupling in depth came following his to rest on those rectangles of warmth alive like blood. From this peat light her great eyes became invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft.

"There's none of this love nonsense," he began again appearing to strain so as not to look at her. "It's logical dear that's what. You see I thought to get my old mother over out of the bombers."

"And quite right too," she answered prompt.

"I'm glad you see it my way," he took her up. "Oh honey you don't know what that means."

"I've always said a wife that can't make a home for her man's mother doesn't merit a place of her own," she announced gentle.

"Then you don't say no?" he asked glancing her way at last. His white face was shot with green from the lawn.

"I haven't said yes have I?" she countered and looked straight at him, her heart opening about her lips. Seated as she was back to the light he could see only a blinding space for her head framed in dark hair and inhabited by those great eyes on her, fathoms deep.

"No that's right," he murmured obviously lost.

In the introduction to my edition (which is the same one linked above), John Updike points to Green's "love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness" and points to a further contradiction: "with upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything."

Posted by About Last Night on May 14, 2008 9:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Posted by About Last Night on May 15, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
LUPONE%20IN%20GYPSY.jpg • Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on May 15, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

BOOK

Richard Stark, Dirty Money (Grand Central, $23.99). Flash: Parker's back. The ruthless burglar you hate to love is out to retrieve, launder, and spend the money he stole and stashed four years ago in Nobody Runs Forever, and--as usual--he'll do anything to get what he wants. Cold, amoral, and impeccably professional, Parker is Donald E. Westlake's most memorable and disturbing creation, and the twenty-fourth of his published capers is every bit as satisfying as its predecessors. Mr. Anecdotal Evidence had an instant conversion experience after reading No. 23, Ask the Parrot. What are you waiting for? (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 15, 2008 9:03 AM | Permalink

THE ALL-AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER

"Jerome Robbins is still so much with us ten years after his death that it's possible to take his achievements for granted--and easy to forget how startling they looked when they were new..."

Posted by About Last Night on May 15, 2008 9:10 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success."

Sigmund Freud (quoted in Ernest Jones, Life and Works of Sigmund Freud)

Posted by About Last Night on May 16, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Toga party

The 2007-08 Broadway season (about which more here) is over at last, and I'm on the road again. My first stop was Washington, D.C., where the Shakespeare Theatre Company is performing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in repertory in its new theater. I saw both productions last Saturday and reviewed them in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

What does a "traditional" Shakespeare production look like? If the phrase still makes you think of Brits in tights, then it's a pretty safe bet that you haven't been to a theater lately. Ever since Orson Welles tossed convention out the window in 1936 and turned "Macbeth" into a voodoo orgy set in Haiti, the old-fashioned way of staging the Bard has grown less and less common with every passing season. Nearly all modern-day directors now treat his plays as unfinished canvases on which they paint their own up-to-date theatrical pictures, sometimes to unforgettably individual effect and sometimes to unforgettably fatuous effect. Most of the best Shakespeare productions I've reviewed in this space--and all of the worst ones--have been revisionist stagings executed along Wellesian lines. As far as my generation of playgoers is concerned, this is what it means to be traditional.

That's why I was excited to hear that the Shakespeare Theatre Company would be performing "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Julius Caesar" in repertory at its brand-new 775-seat downtown theater here--and that the two productions would feature a single cast dressed in traditional Roman costumes. The idea of presenting these plays in tandem may seem obvious, since they share some of the same characters, but I've never seen it done before, and Michael Kahn, the company's artistic director, has opted to emphasize their commonality still further by using the same costume designer, Jennifer Moeller, for both shows and performing them on the same unit set, a stylized rendering of an Elizabethan open stage created by James Noone....

ANTONY%20AND%20CLEOPATRA.jpg Mr. Kahn, who directed "Antony and Cleopatra," is a smart craftsman whose past productions include a straight-down-the-center "Othello" that ranks high on my list of memorable Shakespeare productions--as well as an unintentionally comical Gen-X "Hamlet" that ranks near the bottom. This time around he's skipped the nonsense and opted for a speedy, uncommonly vivid staging in which Suzanne Bertish plays Cleopatra as a woman of a certain age who is sexually besotted with a visibly younger Mark Antony (Andrew Long). Ms. Bertish, who made a tremendous splash on Broadway a quarter-century ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage version of "Nicholas Nickleby," gives a performance of thrilling and alarming intensity...

David Muse, the company's associate artistic director, has staged "Julius Caesar" to somewhat less potent effect, in part because his production lacks the clean, uncluttered directness of Mr. Kahn's "Antony and Cleopatra." But the results still work very well, and the cast is every bit as impressive....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 16, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott

Posted by About Last Night on May 19, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The machine age

getimage.exe.jpeg I belong to the first generation of biographers whose work was shaped by the invention of the personal computer. Not only did I write The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken on a computer, but I bought my first laptop in order to transcribe material from the Mencken Collection, which is housed in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. So far as I know, I was the first person ever to bring a laptop into the Mencken Room, whose contents include, among other fascinating things, the ancient Corona portable typewriter on which Mencken banged out most of his books and other published writings. I like to think that he would have appreciated this fact, but I wouldn't bet on it. "The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car," he told an interviewer in 1946. He didn't even care for the telephone, and I have no doubt that he would have cast a cold eye on cellphones.

I finished writing The Skeptic on September 4, 2001, a week before 9/11. Blogging was uncommon then, and the Internet, though no longer in its infancy, was still in the process of evolving into the supple and protean research tool it has since become. I did almost no Web-based research on The Skeptic. Google existed in 2001, but I'd only just heard of it. Most of my work, as I explained in an online interview conducted in 2002, was done in the Mencken Room:

I spent the better part of five years sifting through the Mencken Collection at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, to which Mencken left most of his private papers--manuscripts, scrapbooks, cancelled checks, even one of the ancient portable typewriters he carted around to the presidential conventions he covered for the Baltimore Sun. It's housed in a wonderful old room that looks like the library of a shabby but distinguished men's club, and the walls are lined with books from Mencken's personal library, many of them inscribed to him by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser. To sit in that room day after day, reading and writing about Mencken, was an extraordinary experience--sometimes I felt as though he were looking over my shoulder--and I also got a kick out of showing the collection to friends who happened to be passing through Baltimore.

All this was great fun, but it was also hugely time-consuming, so much so that I ended up renting a studio apartment in Baltimore, where I spent many three-day weekends during the five years it took me to research The Skeptic. I could have done some of my work in New York, but I found it easier to shuttle at will between the Mencken Room and the stacks of the Pratt Library, running downstairs at regular intervals to flip through dusty copies of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature or spool through a reel of microfilm. (Remember microfilm?)

Everything had changed by the time I got going on Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong four years ago. While I put in a fair amount of time at the Armstrong Archives in Queens and the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, I did much of my research on Rhythm Man seated at my desk in Manhattan, using my iBook to access the archives of the New York Times, The New Yorker, Time magazine and many other publications on line and on CD-ROM. Between them, Google Book Search and Amazon's "Search Inside" feature also made it possible for me to look through more than half of the books I consulted without going to a library. I even "visited" Armstrong's grave from the comfort of my office.

Needless to say, there is no substitute for on-the-spot research. As I wrote two years ago: "To be sure, microfilm and its successor technologies are (mostly) unmixed blessings, but any scholar can tell you that there's no substitute, emotionally speaking, for handling the thing itself, be it a scrapbook or a holograph manuscript. Though constant use has drained the word awesome of much of its meaning, I don't know any other way to describe what it feels like to turn the crumbling pages of the personal scrapbooks of the greatest of all jazz musicians." And while I suppose I could have written the following paragraph from Rhythm Man without first visiting Armstrong's home in Queens, it wouldn't have been the same had I settled for taking a virtual tour of the house and grounds:

[Armstrong's] home, located seven blocks from Shea Stadium in a shabby but respectable part of Queens...is a modest three-story brick-covered frame house whose interior is reminiscent of Graceland, Elvis Presley's gaudy Memphis mansion. From the Jetsons-style kitchen-of-the-future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets of the master bathroom, the house looks like what it is: the residence of a poor boy who grew up and made good. Unlike Graceland, though, Armstrong's house is neither oppressive nor embarrassing. As you stand in the smallish study, whose decorations include a portrait of the artist painted by Tony Bennett, it is impossible not to be touched by the aspiration visible wherever you look. This, it is clear, was the home of a working man, bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but what he did. "I never want to be anything more than I am, what I don't have I don't need," he wrote. "My home with Lucille is good, but you don't see me in no big estates and yachts, that ain't gonna play your horn for you."

But I'm also well aware that without making extensive use of Web-based research, I couldn't have written Rhythm Man while simultaneously serving as The Wall Street Journal's drama critic. I simply wouldn't have had the time. And Web-based research is more than merely a time-saving tool: it allows the biographer to act instantaneously on serendipitous flashes of inspiration. The night before I finished writing the last chapter of Rhythm Man, I found myself wondering whether Jerry Herman had ever said anything in print about Armstrong's recording of "Hello, Dolly!" A few keystrokes later I found out that he had, and that it was both significant and revealing. I immediately transcribed the quotation and incorporated it into the manuscript that I e-mailed to Harcourt three days later.

Still, it is the time-saving aspect of Web-based research that I suspect most biographers will regard as crucial to their professional lives. It took me ten years to write my Mencken book. That's a big chunk out of the life of a middle-aged man, big enough to make him think twice about going back to the well a second time. When I finished The Skeptic, I was sure that I'd never write another primary-source biography. But I did, and it took me just four years to write. That's a lot more manageable, even for a busy drama critic and part-time opera librettist.

So what next? Another biography? A second opera? Or something completely different? I haven't a clue. Now that the Web has cut out so much of the hitherto-inescapable waste motion of a biographer's life, it would seem a shame for me not to build on the things I've learned in the process of writing Rhythm Man. But I don't yet have a subject in mind, nor do I know what I want to do with the rest of my life, other than enjoy it.

What I do know is that I don't intend to spend it sitting around idly--I'm not made that way--and experience has taught me that I'm rarely content to be doing only one thing at a time. Henry James said it: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular as long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" I've had a lot, probably more than most people, in the seven crowded years that have whizzed by since I finished writing The Skeptic. Do I really want to spend four of the years that remain to me writing yet another primary-source biography? We'll see.

Posted by About Last Night on May 19, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Winston Churchill, speech, Nov. 10, 1942

Posted by About Last Night on May 20, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Moment's notice

END%20OF%20OPERA%20%282%29.tiff

I came home from Washington, D.C., yesterday afternoon to find an e-mail from Paul Moravec. It contained a Sibelius sound file and the following message: "La commedia è finita...for now!" The play is over is, of course, the last line of Pagliacci, and the file Paul sent me contained the last scene of The Letter.

Paul has been sending me hot-off-the-press chunks of this scene for the past couple of weeks, and I expected it to be wrapped up by the time I got back from Washington. Even so, I got goosebumps when I saw the title of his e-mail, and much bigger ones as I listened for the first time to the shockingly intense music to which he set the concluding pages of my libretto. I immediately called him in Princeton and left a message: "I just listened to it. Wow, wow, wow, wow, WOW!" As soon as I hung up, I called Mrs. T in Connecticut to tell her that The Letter was finished. Then I took a deep breath and listened to the last five pages of the score three times in a row.

Needless to say, The Letter isn't anywhere near finished. Paul and I still have to grapple with a long list of as-yet-unfixed fixes that we drew up after the workshop performances that took place two months ago. Once they're done, we'll send the vocal score off to the Santa Fe Opera. At the end of July, we're both planning to spend a week in Santa Fe looking at this year's productions, one of which will be staged by Jonathan Kent, who'll be directing The Letter. We're thinking that we may want to make a few more changes to the score and libretto once we've seen what Jonathan does with The Marriage of Figaro. Somewhere along the way, Paul will compose the orchestral interludes that separate the eight scenes of The Letter. Then, toward the end of the summer, we'll send in the final revised version of the vocal score, which will be distributed to the members of the cast. At that point Paul will start orchestrating the opera, and I'll put The Letter aside until next summer, when it goes into rehearsal in Santa Fe.

We're not done, not by a long shot...and yet it feels as though we are. I started drafting the libretto in November of 2006, and Paul started writing the music last May. Ever since then we've been in constant touch, and though both of us have had many other things on our plates, The Letter has never been far from our minds. Now we can catch our breath--briefly.

How does it feel to have reached this point in the making of an opera? I can't speak for Paul, but I feel more or less the way Nuke LaLoosh felt at the end of this scene in Bull Durham:

INT. THE DUGOUT

NUKE PUTS ON HIS WARMUP JACKET and sits down next to Crash Davis, who's taking off his gear, readying to hit.

NUKE I was great, eh?

CRASH Your fastball was up and your curveball was hanging--in the Show they woulda ripped you.

NUKE Can't you let me enjoy the moment?

CRASH The moment's over.

Again, I don't know about Paul, but I didn't break open any Dom Perignon last night. Better than anyone, we know how much work we have left to do between now and July 25, 2009, and none of it is going to be easy. So yes, the moment's over--but as long as I live, I'll never forget how it felt to open that e-mail and listen for the first time to the last five pages of The Letter. You don't get many moments like that in a lifetime.

Posted by About Last Night on May 20, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: 5 x 5 Books Where Double Agents Lurk by David Samuels

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today's installment comes from journalist David Samuels, who has two new books out from New Press: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which collects a decade's worth of reportage and essays for Harper's and The New Yorker, and The Runner, an expansion of Samuels's well-known New Yorker article on James Hogue, the 28-year-old drifter who conned his way into Princeton.

In a favorable review of Only Love Can Break Your Heart that ran in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, the reviewer noted how Samuels's journalism, which is populated with portraits of the self-deluded, the washed-up, and con artists, is "a tribute to the twin American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit." Fitting then that what Samuels chose to contribute here is his top five books featuring double agents.

1. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad's answer to Crime and Punishment is a sophisticated portrait of the psychological blankness and lack of any settled sense of self that are essential ingredients for at least one major character in every decent modern spy novel. Narrated by an old Conrad-like Englishman living in Switzerland, the novel tells the story of a Russian university student named Razumov who betrays the confidence of the revolutionary terrorist Victor Haldin only to fall in love with Victor's sister, Natalie. The story of Razumov's serial betrayals and the final disappointment of his hopes for redemption and forgiveness are opens up the cold landscape of betrayal that generations of brilliant spy novelists like Eric Ambler, John Le Carre, Charles McCarry and Alan Furst would populate with betrayers and seducers whose job was to teach readers the cruel lessons of the 20th century, etc.. A much better novel than The Secret Agent.

2. Out of the Night by Jan Valtin. Jan Valtin's account of his life as an agent of the Communist International -- the Comintern -- working to destroy the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s is one of the most horrifying and illuminating political memoirs of the 20th century. The communist decision to form a strategic alliance with Hitler proves to be one of the most deluded and disastrous political miscalculations of modern history. Valtin is captured, then tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo for three years before he offers to become a Nazi agent in the hopes of saving his dedicated and long-suffering wife Firelei and their young son. Secretly remaining under communist discipline, Valtin finds himself caught between the horrors of the Stalinist purges and dank Nazi torture chambers. He eventually immigrates to America, though it is hard to say that this book -- a huge bestseller when published in 1941, and almost entirely forgotten today -- ends well. A good primer on 20th century Europe, and how political ideologies eat the brains of their adherents.

3. Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow. Famous as a friend and sometime musical collaborator of the brilliant and canny jazz originator Louis Armstrong in the 1920s and 1930s, Mezz Mezzrow was equally famous in jazz circles for selling some of the best marijuana on the East Coast. His autobiography tells the story of the birth of jazz as American popular music with a fan's love and a musician's insight. Mezzrow's hipster vibe is balanced by his personal modesty and his unbounded admiration for Armstrong's genius. Mezzrow eventually came to believe that his deep love for black music and his years of sharing the Negro condition had actually transformed him from a dark-skinned, curly haired Detroit Jew into a black man, a form of personal rebirth that was formally certified by the New York State prison system when Mezzrow was incarcerated as a Negro, making him the first official White Negro, Wigger, or what have you.

4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré. John Le Carré, now an ill-tempered author of crappy thrillers, once wrote cold, witty, mean-spirited books with a painterly feel for the shades of gray inhabited by the middle-aged men who fought the battles of the Cold War. While Graham Greene may be hopelessly overrated, Le Carré is a great 20th century novelist whose four or five best books about the shadowy intelligence and counter-intelligence wars of the Cold War are sure bets to be read fifty or a hundred years from now for subtle psychological portraiture and for pure entertainment. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is Le Carré's thoroughly depressing version of the Philby-Burgess-MacClean spy scandal that exposed the rottenness of the British ruling class. Wives betray their husbands, pudgy men read old documents in ill-heated rooms, idealism dissipates into the disappointments of late middle age, and hate and spite reign superior to generosity and love. The BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness is nearly as good as the book; the BBC version of LeCarre's sequel, Smiley's People, is even better.

5. Libra by Don DeLillo. The displaced, cocky, abusive idealist who makes defining choices only to end up as a pawn in someone else's game is Don DiLillo's greatest fictional character (the character named Jack Ruby in this novel might rank fourth or fifth). Like many other DeLillo's novels, Libra is both a po-mo book about storytelling and a brilliant rendering of life on the fringes of American mass society. What makes this novel special is DeLillo's ability to concentrate for so long and at such a high poetic pitch on the contradictions of Oswald's character until he breaks free from the mass of conspiracy theories and counter-conspiracy theories to become a flesh and blood character in DeLillo's own novel. DeLillo may be a poor heir to the mantle of Pynchon and Gaddis but he does have the makings of a truly great modern spy novelist. I would like to suggest that Mr. DeLillo read Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games by former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent "Pete" Bagley, and get to work on a double agent novel about the fake KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. I'd love to read it.

Posted by About Last Night on May 20, 2008 12:05 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"If any one asks me for good advice, I say I will give it, but only on condition that you promise me not to take it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe

Posted by About Last Night on May 21, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Particularly individualizing and not ungraceful

I've been thinking a lot about character names lately and admiring other writer's choices and inventions. For example, in Mark's novel, Harry, Revised, the main character is named Harry Rent, and it's such a good name -- simple, but suggestive of grief (i.e., the rending that follows a death, which fits as Harry's a widower) as well as of the provisional, semi-permanent state (i.e., renting, not owning) that sets off Harry's "revision" process.

Then there's the less subtle, still marvelous class of character names: Uriah Heep, Augustus Gloop, Undine Sprague (possibly my favorite ever), Fevvers, Stephen Dedalus, the fragile Glass family, and so on.

So, I was amused to come across this letter today in The Notebooks of Henry James. It was written in response to a reader of The Liar with a personal interest in James's use of "Capadose" for a character name:

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
13 Oct. 1896.

My dear Sir,
You may be very sure that if I had ever had the pleasure of meeting a person of your striking name I wouldn't have used the name, especially for the purpose of the tale you allude to.

It was exactly because I had no personal or private associations with it that I felt free to do so. But I am afraid that (in answer to your amiable inquiry) it is late in the day for me to tell you how I came by it.

The Liar was written (originally published in The Century Magazine) 10 years ago--and I simply don't remember.

Fiction-mongers collect proper names, surnames, &c.--make notes and lists of any odd or unusual, as handsome or ugly ones they see or hear--in newspapers (columns of births, deaths, marriages, &c.) or in directories and signs of shops or elsewhere; fishing out of these memoranda in time of need the one that strikes them as good for a particular case.

"Capadose" must be in one of my old note-books. I have a dim recollection of having found it originally in the first column of The Times, where I find almost all the names I store up for my puppets. It was picturesque and rare and so I took possession of it. I wish--if you care at all--that I had applied it to a more exemplary individual! But my romancing Colonel was a charming man, in spite of his little weakness.

I congratulate you on your bearing a name that is at once particularly individualizing and not ungraceful (as so many rare names are).

I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly
Henry James

I also like how you could set this letter to "This Is Just To Say": I have named a character with your surname ... Forgive me, it was too tempting: so picturesque, so rare." (Commas, &c. added to make it suitably Jamesian.)

Posted by About Last Night on May 21, 2008 12:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself."

E.M. Forster, "Anonymity: An Enquiry"

Posted by About Last Night on May 22, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, performed in alternating repertory through July 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on May 22, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Janes from James and others

My question about the Jane Chord is whether one is permitted, in the many cases in which a book begins with an article, to append the word that follows. I bet Terry's answer is a gentle no, dear. But how much more fertile the ground of my personal library if this small cheat is granted. To wit:

The Turn of the Screw: "The story stopped."

If you're familiar with the particular way Henry James frames his ambiguous tale, or even just with the tale's central ambiguity, that should give you all the frisson of a coded message arrived from beyond the grave.

What about other James? Doesn't he just strike you as the kind of writer who would have planted such bonus meaning, in full consciousness of what he was doing? Indeed, a stroll through the corpus turns up a few beauties.

The Awkward Age: "Save tomorrow."
The Bostonians: "Olive shed." (!)

The Ambassadors: "Strether's Strether." (!!)

James's memoir of his childhood, A Small Boy and Others: "In gap."

Somewhere he's chuckling, I tell you.

E. M. Forster's epigraph to Howards End famously tells us to "Only connect"; his Jane Chord underlines the sentiment with "One never." George Eliot's Daniel Deronda yields the uplifting "Men noble," while the constitutionally beclouded Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, gives us an "On" to begin and an "on" to end; they beg for an "and" to connect them, or at least a suggestive comma.

I wish I could find my latest copy of Transit of Venus--a book that metes out its secrets as artfully as any, and that I'm certain holds some I haven't discovered yet. But I'm forever giving that book away. Anyone?

Posted by About Last Night on May 22, 2008 12:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst."

Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad

Posted by About Last Night on May 23, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Putting a new spin on Carousel

In this week's Wall Street Journal drama column, written from the road, I report on a New Haven show, Long Wharf Theatre's revival of Carousel, plus an important off-Broadway event, the American premiere of Conor McPherson's Port Authority. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

From the Broadway run of "August: Osage County" and the Off Broadway transfer of "Adding Machine" to the regional-theater Tony awarded to Chicago Shakespeare Theater, this was the season when East Coast playgoers found out for themselves that theater in Chicago is as good as it gets. Now comes yet another Windy City stunner to hammer home the point. The Court Theatre's small-scale production of "Carousel," co-produced with New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, has moved from Chicago to its second home in Connecticut. If you were impressed by Lincoln Center Theater's handsome hit version of "South Pacific," prepare to be floored: This "Carousel," staged by Charles Newell, the Court's artistic director, is the best Rodgers and Hammerstein revival I've ever seen.

Unlike Bartlett Sher's freshened-up but fundamentally conventional "South Pacific," Mr. Newell's "Carousel" is a wholly original, deeply creative transformation of a musical that has always struck me as an uncomfortable blend of realism and sentimentality. Not since John Doyle's similarly scaled staging of "Company" have I seen a musical revival that completely changed the way I felt about a show I thought I knew by heart....

Mr. Newell's "Carousel" is played out on a near-bare thrust stage by a skeleton crew of 15 actors and accompanied not by a luscious-sounding pit band but a frugal 10-piece orchestra. No drummer, no synthesizer, no fancy sets, no wireless mikes, nothing but the show itself, unadorned and true. The result is a startlingly intimate "Carousel" that is all the more affecting for being so simple. Even the sentimentality becomes believable once it's pared down to life size...

Conor McPherson, who knocked me flat in December with "The Seafarer," is back in town with the American premiere of "Port Authority." Written in 2002, it's a series of interwoven monologues by three unhappy Irishmen waiting for a bus, and if that sounds like the start of an ethnic joke, don't be thrown off the scent: The 37-year-old Mr. McPherson is already a class-A playwright, and "Port Authority," like "The Seafarer," comes from out of his top drawer....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 23, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Minor key versus major

If Terry and OGIC are playing with Jane chords, I thought I might play too. As my first little foray into the Jane game, I decided to look up the Jane chord of the original edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel, which has the poems in the order Ted Hughes put them after Plath's death, and compare it to the Jane chord of the restored edition of Ariel, which came out in 2004 and "reinstates" the order Plath had planned for the book.

In Her Husband, her excellent, balanced biography focusing on the Plath-Hughes marriage and creative partnership, Diane Middlebrook writes:

The Ariel Hughes published was not identical with the manuscript titled Ariel that Plath had organized in the black spring binder he found on her desk after her death. As editor, Hughes reshuffled the poems, destroying the narrative arc that Plath had described in her notes on the manuscript. He omitted some of the poems Plath had intended to include--he cut "The Rabbit Catcher," for example. And he added poems that Plath had not included, poems written after she finished the Ariel manuscript, poems that Plath intended for another book. His most significant intervention was to replace the hopeful poem "Wintering"--the ending Plath had designed for Ariel--with "Edge":
The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

Ariel original edition (with "The Edge" as the final poem): "Love drag."
Ariel: The Restored Edition (with "Wintering" as the final poem): "Love spring."*

It's an illuminating difference, isn't it?

But, as Meghan O'Rourke argued in Slate in 2004, while Hughes's editing of the original Ariel manuscript is regarded with suspicion by many of Plath's adherents ("he stole her hope!"), it may have been beneficial:

The real problem with Hughes' interference is that we can't separate the emotional relationship from the intellectual, artistic relationship--and we don't trust Hughes to, either. But from this distance Plath seems fortunate to have had his input. It's easy to forget now how radical Plath's poetry--with its elemental female anger, its sexual voracity, its self-loathing knowingness--was in 1963. A number of the poems Plath wrote in 1961 and 1962 had been turned down by editors who didn't understand them. Plath's publishers in the U.K. didn't want to publish Ariel, nor could Hughes convince Knopf, in the United States, to publish the new poems. "People didn't understand what they were getting at, or didn't like what they saw," the critic A. Alvarez later told Janet Malcolm. Hughes did get Plath's poems. And in a strange way, there is something moving about what he did. It is surely an emotionally complicated task to spend two years carefully reorganizing the work of your dead wife so as to persuade someone to publish a book that will implicate you in her tragic fate. And the irony is that, in reorganizing Ariel to emphasize the ultimate price of Plath's emotional injuries, Hughes, like Samson, brought down the walls of the temple around him, even as he helped his wife take flight.

* To compare more fully, here are the last lines of each poem that turn the Jane chord around:
"The Edge"
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

"Wintering"
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Posted by About Last Night on May 23, 2008 12:32 AM | Permalink

CAAF: The woods are shrieking

For the past week or so, our neighborhood's been in the throes of a full-scale cicada invasion. They emerge every 17 years in Asheville -- red-eyed beasties that flutter around with metallic iridescent wings. (They look like elaborate golden clockworks when the sun hits right.) They're everywhere, and they're loud. As I type this, it sounds like a siren or a car alarm is going off somewhere close by. The sound starts at dawn and then dies down at dusk, hitting full volume around mid afternoon. That's also the hardest time of day to go out for a walk; the cicadas seem to be at their most active then and can plonk you in the head as they fly by.

I asked Lowell to snap these pics. I wish he had a panoramic lens to catch the sheer plenitude. The street outside our house is littered with the various life stages of a cicada: plain brown molted exoskeletons, mating cicadas (two conjoined tail to tail), dying cicadas with quivering legs as well as dead ones, and there are grease spots running up and down the road where cars have run over them. The rest, like the ones below, are in the trees -- eating and laying eggs in the branches and singing, singing.

Posted by About Last Night on May 23, 2008 1:26 PM | Permalink

TT: After the good die young

When William Kapell died in a plane crash in 1953 at the age of 31, he was well on the way to becoming an international classical-music celebrity. Instead he was forgotten. It wasn't until his complete commercial recordings were reissued in a nine-CD box set in 1998 that a new generation of listeners discovered Kapell, and even now the fact that he was America's greatest native-born pianist is not yet widely recognized.

Earlier this month RCA released a two-CD set of live recordings made by Kapell in Australia a few weeks before he died. The release of Kapell Rediscovered is the occasion for my "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal, in which I reflect on Kapell's brief but extraordinary career--and on the reasons why he is so poorly remembered now.

To find out why William Kapell vanished into the cultural memory hole, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and see what I have to say in "Sightings." Or read the whole thing here.

* * *

The only known video footage of Kapell's playing is a kinescope of a TV appearance he made on Omnibus in 1953. Here it is:

Posted by About Last Night on May 24, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CD

The Art of Segovia (DGG, two CDs). For much of the twentieth century, Andrés Segovia was the world's best-known guitarist, and his concerts and recordings played a key role in re-establishing the guitar as a classical instrument. Alas, he kept on playing far too long for his own good, and by the time of his death in 1987 at the age of ninety-four, his reputation was in eclipse. This two-disc set, a fabulously well-chosen anthology of Segovia's greatest hits drawn mainly from the recital albums that he recorded for Decca in the Fifties, provides ample proof that he was every bit as good as his reputation. It contains guitar solos and transcriptions by (among others) Albéniz, Bach, Falla, Rodrigo, Roussel, Scarlatti, Tárrega, Torroba, and Villa-Lobos, all played with the grandly romantic sweep and impeccable technique that he commanded in his prime (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 24, 2008 11:10 PM | Permalink

DVD

Jacques d'Amboise: Portrait of a Great American Dancer (VAI). This is not a talking-heads documentary lightly sprinkled with fleeting performance snippets, but an anthology of long-lost TV appearances in which one of the foremost male ballet dancers of the Fifties and Sixties can be seen in uncut versions of George Balanchine's Apollo and Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun (dancing opposite the justly legendary Tanaquil LeClercq). Also included are four pas de deux and a rarity, Lew Christensen's Filling Station, one of the very first ballets on American themes, set to a witty score by Virgil Thomson. The moldering black-and-white kinescopes are a bit on the fuzzy side, but d'Amboise's charm and athleticism come through with immediate and irresistible clarity (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on May 25, 2008 8:52 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility."

Flannery O'Connor, "The Nature and Aims of Fiction"

Posted by About Last Night on May 26, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Honoris causa

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a great fan of the crime novels that Donald E. Westlake publishes under the transparent pseudonym of "Richard Stark," in which he chronicles the capers of a hard-nosed professional burglar known only as Parker who is widely thought to look quite a bit like Lee Marvin:

In addition to choosing Dirty Money, Stark's latest, as a Top Five pick, I reviewed it admiringly and at greater length here. In that piece I pointed out that most of the early Parker novels are out of print, and that many of them fetch alarmingly high prices on the used-book market.

So it was with great interest that I learned the other day that the University of Chicago Press will be reprinting the first three Parker novels on September 15. The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit will be followed in chronological order by the next thirteen Parker novels, ending with Butcher's Moon, originally published in 1974. Parker went on a twenty-three-year-long vacation after Butcher's Moon, returning in 1997 with Comeback. (The post-Comeback novels are all in print.) Says the press release:

You probably haven't ever noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack.
They're thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They're pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you're planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is the heister's heister, the robber's robber, the heavy's heavy. You don't want to cross him, and you don't want to get in his way, because he'll stop at nothing to get what he's after.

Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark's eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style--and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency--Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre. The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of this series to print for a new generation of readers to discover--and become addicted to.

Nicely put.

Amazon is now taking advance orders for The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit. You know what to do. After you've done it, go here to read the first lines of all twenty-four Parker novels. This one is my favorite: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."

You can't get down to business much faster than that.

Posted by About Last Night on May 26, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Waving the flag

If you're taking the day off and don't know why, perhaps this painting, Childe Hassam's "Allies Day, May 1917," will remind you. It's part of a now-celebrated series of paintings on which Hassam embarked after seeing the Preparedness Day parade that took place in New York City on May 13, 1916. "I painted the flag series after we went into the war," he later recalled. "There was that Preparedness Day, and I looked up the avenue and saw these wonderful flags waving, and I painted the series of flag pictures after that."

To learn more about Hassam's flag paintings, go here.

To view a 1932 film of Hassam at work, go here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 26, 2008 12:10 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Doing this I'm
on trial
After that
you are

Arnold Friedman, inscription on back of painting (n.d.)

Posted by About Last Night on May 27, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Bargain basement

Two years ago I wrote a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal in which I described Arnold Friedman, who died in near-obscurity in 1946, as "the greatest artist you've never heard of." I'd been writing about Friedman at odd intervals since 2003, when I made mention in my old "Second City" column for the Washington Post of an exhibition of paintings from the collection of Tommy and Gill LiPuma that included several of his canvases.

One of them, "Still Life (Petunias)," was also included in the Friedman retrospective that was the occasion for my "Sightings" column. It impressed me as much in 2006 as it had three years earlier: "In the foreground is a vase of flowers whose vibrantly colored petals all but burst off the canvas....Hanging on the wall immediately behind the vase is the lower half of an abstract painting--Friedman's way of underlining the subtle relationship between abstraction and representation. The juxtaposition of the two genres is both witty and thought-provoking, unveiling fresh layers of implication at every glance."

So why haven't you heard of Friedman? That question was the subject of my "Sightings" column:

Arnold Friedman spent most of his adult life toiling as a postal clerk in Manhattan, painting in his attic after hours. Not long after his death in 1946, Clement Greenberg, the critic who put Jackson Pollock on the map, called Friedman "one of the best painters this country has ever produced," praising his Post-Impressionist landscapes as "for color and texture...without equal in our time." Yet even Greenberg's lavish praise failed to make a dent in his obscurity, and "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint," which opened two weeks ago, is the first large-scale retrospective of his work to be held since 1950.
Where can you see this extraordinary show? The Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art both own paintings by Friedman. The permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art is largely devoted to modern painters of his generation. Which of these august New York institutions saw the light? None of them. "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint" is on display through June 30 at Hollis Taggart Galleries, right across the street from the Whitney, and several of the finest paintings in the show are for sale.

In recent years a growing number of commercial art galleries in Manhattan have been mounting museum-quality shows devoted to insufficiently appreciated artists of the past....Any museum in town would have been graced by these shows--yet it was left to the galleries to put them on.

Why? One reason is that virtually all of the top American museums have succumbed to a bigger-is-better mentality that leads them to devote huge chunks of their exhibition space to blockbuster shows by popular artists. Just as important, though, are the art-historical "narratives" that curators use to decide how--or whether--they will hang works from their permanent collections.

In the received version of the history of modernism, for instance, it's taken for granted that American art did not come to maturity until the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the '40s. Artists who fail to fit neatly into that story line, either because (like Friedman) they came along too soon or preferred to work in a different style, are ignored or pushed off to one side--sometimes literally. Milton Avery, a major American artist who flirted with abstraction but chose not to embrace it, is represented in the Museum of Modern Art by a single canvas, "Sea Grasses and Blue Sea," hung in a stairwell. It used to hang in the cloakroom....

As for "Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint," I've seen it twice, and I plan to go back a third time. Among other things, I want to take one last look at Friedman's "Sawtooth Falls," a 1945 canvas of the utmost splendor. It's on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, but I've never seen it there, nor do I expect MoMA to hang it any time soon--unless, of course, they can find an empty stairwell.

So far as I know, "Sawtooth Falls" has yet to be put on display by MoMA, nor has the Metropolitan Museum of Art ever bothered to hang its lone Friedman, "Unemployable," at any time since I've been going there. But immediately after I wrote my Wall Street Journal column about Friedman, I acquired one of his prints from the Philadelphia Print Shop for the modest price of $225. Last week I bought another, a 1930 lithograph called "Two Polo Players," from Bloom Fine Art and Antiques. It cost me $240.

Here it is:

%2817%29%20FRIEDMAN%20POLO%20PLAYERS.jpg

Needless to say, I'd like to own one of Friedman's oil paintings or pastels, but I haven't got that kind of money to throw around. Fortunately, he was also a superbly gifted printmaker, and "Two Polo Players" fits very nicely into the Teachout Museum.

I pass on this story both to share my delight in my new acquisition and to inspire those of you who long to try your hand at collecting art but suffer from the mistaken notion that you have to be rich to do so. Two hundred and forty dollars for a limited-edition lithograph by a chronically underappreciated American master strikes me as a damned good deal. So what are you waiting for?

Posted by About Last Night on May 27, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Cultural conservatism is becoming an older writer: anything else is cosmetics anyway. If he whores after the new thing, he will only get it wrong and wind up praising the latest charlatans, the floozies of the New. His business is keeping his own tradition alive and extending it into its own future: an old writer can grow indefinitely, what he cannot do is keep up."

Wilfrid Sheed, Essays in Disguise

Posted by About Last Night on May 28, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Peter Pears sings Schubert's "Wohin?" (from Die schöne Müllerin) with Benjamin Britten at the piano:

(This is the first in a weekly series of arts-related videos that will appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Posted by About Last Night on May 28, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Asparagus abounds

My neighborhood is at its best this time of year. A hundred kinds of flowers are in bloom, but the lilac bushes that edge the front of my U-shaped courtyard building establish precedence, sending their perfume back into the further reaches of the long courtyard and through an only slightly cracked window (it's been cool out) to scent my living room. It's lovely, though of course it's a decisively urban form of natural beauty: cultivated, tended, counting on the contrast with brick and pavement for much of its effect.

At times like these, when I'm most attuned to natural world with its circumscribed but still affecting role in my citified life, I wonder: WWGWD? What was Gilbert White doing, 275 years ago in the English village of Selborne and environs, at this time of the year? What was he observing and recording, what variations was he finding in the seasonal rhythm from year to year? If you've been reading "About Last Night" for a while, you know that I turn to White every once in a while for the wonders he recorded, for his dogged observation and sharp discernment, for the way he puts the humble human scale in perspective by telling us tinier stories about tinier worlds, and for the poetic economy with which he expresses all of this. Here are sccenes from May.

May 23 to June 3, 1772. [Ringmer] Wryneck pipes. The Ringmer-tortoise came forth from it's hybernaculum on the 6th of April, but did not appear to eat 'til May the 5th: it does not eat but on hot days. As far as I could find it has no perceptible pulse. The mole-cricket seems to chur all night.
May 20, 1774. Flycatcher appears: the latest summer-bird of passage. The stoparola is most punctual to the 20th of May!!! This bird, which comes so late, begins building immediately.

May 19, 1775. No chafers appear as yet: in those seasons that they abound they deface the foliage of the whole country, especially on the downs, where woods & hedges are scarce. Regulus non cristatus stridet voce locustulae [wood wren]: this bird, the latest and largest willow-wren, haunts the tops of the tallest woods, making a stammering noise at intervals, & shivering with it's wings. Bank-martins abound over the ponds in the forest: swifts seldom appear in cold, black days round the church.
May 21. Mr. Yalden's tank is dry.
May 23. Dutch -honeysuckles in fine bloom.
May 24. Thrushes now, during this long drought, for want of worms hunt-out shell-snails, & pick them to pieces for their young. My horses begin to lie abroad.

May 24, 1776. [Winton] Cold dew, hot sun, soft even.

May 22, 1779. Nightingales have eggs. They build a very inartificial nest with dead leaves. & dry stalks. Their eggs are of a dull olive colour. A boy took my nest with five eggs: but the cock continues to sing: so probably they will build again.
May 24. Fiery lily bows: orange lily blows.
May 26. The nightingale continues to sing; & therefore is probably building again.
May 28. Young pheasants!

May 14, 1782. Tortoise eats the leaves of poppies.

May 15, 1784. The tortoise is very earnest for the leaves of poppies, which he hunts about after, & seems to prefer to any other green thing. Such is the vicissitude of matters where weather is concerned, that the spring, which last year was unusually backward, is now forward.
May 16. Sultry. Left off fires in the parlor. So much sun hurries the flowers out of bloom. Flesh-flies begin to appear.
May 19. Flowers fade, & go-off very fast thro' heat. There has been only one moderate shower all this month. Bees thrive. Asparagus abounds.

I previously excerpted White's journals here and here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 28, 2008 8:53 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."

Louis Pasteur, lecture, University of Lille (Dec. 7, 1854)

Posted by About Last Night on May 29, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)
PORT%20AUTHORITY.jpg • Port Authority (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes June 22, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, performed in alternating repertory through July 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NEW HAVEN, CONN.:
• Carousel (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on May 29, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Morning coffee

• What you'll find in Alberto Manguel's 30,000 volume library in rural France: A section devoted to versions of the Faust legend, Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, lots of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick, Plato, thousands of detective novels, and "dozens of very bad books that I don't throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad." What's not in the library: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, because "I felt [it] infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain." (This is an older link but a goodie. Via Bookdwarf.)

• Zadie Smith's appreciation of the best of all books, Middlemarch, begins with a look at Henry James's review of the novel, written when he was 30: "To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It's strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man's certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant."

Posted by About Last Night on May 29, 2008 9:05 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

Tennessee Williams (quoted in the New York Times, Mar. 18, 1965)

Posted by About Last Night on May 30, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Sweetly delectable

My summer travels for The Wall Street Journal have now begun in earnest. In today's drama column I review two regional-theater revivals, the Huntington Theatre Company's She Loves Me in Boston and Hartford Stage's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore in Hartford, Connecticut. Both are of excellent quality, but The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is strictly for Tennessee Williams fans. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

SHE%20LOVES%20ME.jpg What's the best musical ever written? That depends on whether I saw "The Fantasticks," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Guys and Dolls," "Gypsy," "Kiss Me, Kate," "On the Town" or "Sweeney Todd" last. But I'm never in doubt about my number-two choice: "She Loves Me" is the most sweetly romantic musical imaginable, the theatrical equivalent of a hot-fudge sundae with two spoons, and the Huntington Theatre Company's new revival serves it up in a fancy dish. Smartly staged, attractively designed and well cast, this production is a great way to get to know a show beloved of musical-comedy buffs but inexplicably little known to the playgoing public at large....

Kate Baldwin, who was so memorable in the outstanding revival of "A Little Night Music" presented by Baltimore's CenterStage earlier this season, is even better this time around as Amalia, the lovelorn clerk who doesn't know that she's fallen for one of her colleagues. Not only is she a fine actress, at once spirited and affecting, but she also has the vocal chops necessary to nail the high C in "Ice Cream" and make it stick....

I've never been able to get on Tennessee Williams' wavelength, and if you share my disability, be warned that "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" probably won't help you tune in. This 1963 play, which flopped twice in a row on Broadway, is one of Williams' ripest exercises in southern-fried Gothicism, a parable about a rich, imperious and scared old lady with the improbable name of Flora Goforth (Olympia Dukakis) who is dictating her memoirs to an uptight Ivy League prig (Maggie Lacey) in a frantic attempt to set the record straight before she dies of cancer. Enter Chris (Kevin Anderson), a ne'er-do-well sculptor-poet who lives off rich, imperious and scared old ladies, then moves on as soon as they kick off. Is he a gigolo, a parasite, the Angel of Death or some combination of the above? Will he sleep with Flora's secretary, thus awakening her stunted sexuality? Will Flora finish her book, coax her sculptor-poet into the sack and die happy? Yada yada yada yada yada, and then some....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on May 30, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Harvey Korman, R.I.P.

His New York Times obituary is here. Alas, it neglects to mention this Carol Burnett Show sketch, the funniest ever telecast on a variety show. I saw it as a boy and never forgot it.

Posted by About Last Night on May 30, 2008 8:19 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I think it's good to admit what a wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who know they aren't nice."

Kay Ryan

Posted by About Last Night on May 30, 2008 2:24 PM | Permalink