About Last Night: July 2008 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Tabitha went to Church with the Priaulx and to Service with my mother sometimes; but I am not sure she had a religion really. She had faith. I don't know in what, or how. She suffered in her life, yet I doubt if she was ever truly unhappy. She seemed to know that underneath everything was good. I wish I could think the same."

G.B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

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

TT: Semicolonoscopy

I read Paul Collins' article in Slate about the decline and fall of the semicolon with interest and amusement. I confess, though, that the first thing I did was search through the piece for George Orwell's name. While Orwell was mentioned in passing, Collins failed to include the wonderfully trivial fact that the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four claimed to have written an entire novel, Coming Up for Air, that contains no semicolons whatsoever. "I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one," he explained in a letter to Roger Senhouse.

But did he succeed? It's been years since I last read Coming Up for Air, and I didn't collate it for semicolons on that occasion. Since then a searchable e-text of the book, which was published in 1939, has been posted by Project Gutenberg, and no sooner did I start trolling for the allegedly superfluous punctuation mark than I found this characteristic passage, in which Orwell's narrator describes a nasty little diner to which he paid a visit in search of an edible meal:

Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in. There's a kind of atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in. Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can't taste and can hardly believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it's hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy. Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food doesn't matter, comfort doesn't matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything's streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap jerked them at me with about as much interest as you'd throw ants' eggs to a goldfish.

Damn.

Having found that a cherished literary myth was nothing more than that, I searched the rest of Coming Up for Air and located four more semicolons. I was shocked--shocked! Maybe Louis Menand was right after all.

As for me, I rarely use semicolons in my own writing. This is not a quirk: I've spent years cultivating the art of writing the way I talk, and you can't really "speak" a semicolon out loud. (Maybe John Gielgud could, but I can't.) So I eschew them--usually. I can't remember the last time I used one in a Wall Street Journal column. The manuscript of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which is 175,000 words long, contains no more than one or, at most, two semicolons per chapter, not counting those that appear in quotations from other writers. Several chapters are entirely semicolon-free.

For what it's worth, here's an example of how I used the semicolon in Rhythm Man:

For all his virtuosity, Armstrong was never at his best when playing at fast tempos. It was in ballads, swinging medium-tempo numbers, and the blues that he did his most creative improvising. If he had recorded nothing but "Star Dust" and "St. Louis Blues," he would still be remembered as the greatest jazz soloist of his time; if he had recorded nothing but "Chinatown, My Chinatown" and "I Got Rhythm," he would be remembered only as a high-note specialist with a funny voice.

And yes, you can say that one out loud. Try it.

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

TT: Almanac

"Provincialism is not merely lacking city taste in arts and manners; it is also an increasingly vital antidote to all would-be central tyrannies."

John Fowles, introduction to G.B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

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

TT: Snapshot

Noël Coward sings "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" on CBS in 1955:

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

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

TT: Words to the wise

• Makoto Fujimura, with whom I sit on the National Council on the Arts, is a Japanese-American abstract expressionist who uses traditional Japanese painting techniques to strikingly modern effect. His canvases (one of which hangs in the Teachout Museum, much to my delight) are at once tranquil and deeply involving. "Charis," an exhibition of recent paintings by Fuijmura, goes up today at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea. The show is on view through August 2. I'll be there--you come, too.

For more information, go here.

• Charlie Victor Romeo is playing at the Undergroundzero Festival. I reviewed it in The Wall Street Journal four years ago, at a time when I was undergoing therapy for fear of flying--proof, if anyone needed it, that I take my job very seriously. Here's part of what I wrote about the show in 2004:

Forget reality TV. If you want to watch raw slices of real life--and death--transformed into the highest possible drama, go see "Charlie Victor Romeo," a performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six airplane crashes. (The title is military alphabetic code for "Cockpit Voice Recorder.") "Charlie Victor Romeo" holds you in a hammerlock for 90 unforgettable minutes. It's the most frightening show I've ever seen....
You stroll into a grubby black-box theater (talk about ironic!) in which a nondescript mock cockpit is placed at center stage. The house goes dark and a slide flashes on a screen overhead, telling you the flight number and date and how many people were on board, followed by a stark description of what went wrong: ICING. EXPLODING ENGINE. MULTIPLE BIRD STRIKES. Then the lights come up and all hell breaks loose.

Not always at once, though. Instead, you might find a pilot and co-pilot chatting away agreeably, flirting with a flight attendant, griping about this or that minor nuisance. But sooner or later--always without warning--something terrible happens, and in an instant the theater becomes a sweatbox. You watch in horror as the crew scrambles to save the ship while alarms beep and buzz, the radio crackles urgently and passengers scream on the far side of the cockpit door....

Four shows only, on July 8-11. To order tickets--if you dare--go here.

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

TT: Almanac

"I was going to be the hero of my own life. When you live in a world of make-believe it's not because something is bad but because something is more in the make-believe. Everything was more heightened, more love, more death. I'm an opera. If I didn't act, I'd be all over the place."

Amanda Plummer, interview, New York Times (April 28, 1996)

Posted by About Last Night on July 3, 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, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)
• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes July 20, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, closes July 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CHICAGO:
• A Taste of Honey (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, performed in alternating repertory, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on July 3, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Daughters of the Cumbrian north

Bless Jessa Crispin for this review of Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North. It's a great novel -- well-paced, thought-provoking, beautifully written -- the kind of novel you finish and immediately want to make all your friends read. Except the first couple times I tried to pass it on, my friends ran fleeing from the book, afraid it was The Handmaid's Tale revisited. Because like Handmaid's Tale, Hall's novel is set in a dystopian future where, among other bad things, women are fitted with metallic doohickies that keep them from reproducing. But unlike Handmaid's Tale, Sarah Hall's novel isn't, well, boring.

As Jessa writes:

I am aware that as a human being, and especially as a woman, I am supposed to like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But when I read her 1985 novel of women living in a repressive theocratic regime, forced into either celibacy or involuntary breeding, all I could think was, "OK, so when do these women start stabbing people?" I like a good dystopia as much as anyone, but I prefer mine to come with an organized resistance army.

Exactly! I love Atwood, but I've always ranked The Handmaid's Tale as my least favorite of her books (with The Blind Assassin at the top). It's been a while but in my memory reading it was like taking a long forced march through flat, didactic country. Like reading The Fountainhead, where you stagger through the long speeches and philosophy desperately hoping for another scene of Howard Roarke and Dominique What's-Her-Face throwing down.

In a Q & A that appears in the back of Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall says she set out to write a book that "[took] a look at the relationship between war and society and ask several questions. Under what circumstances might we have to turn to violence? Do we renege on our claim to be civilized when we go to war? Can we go to war in the defense of civilization? When is war right, and when is it wrong? And can women make good soldiers?" All big questions, but what I appreciated is how fully digested they were into the novel, and that the novel, in fact, remained a true novel: rich and engrossing and expressive of ambivalence, or negative capability. No polemic to duck, no long speeches to skip. (If anything, the novel's chief flaw is its brevity; the ending is overly rushed and abrupt and a couple of the later narrative lines -- such as the one with Chloe and Martin, if you've read the book -- are advanced too quickly.)

One reason I think Daughters of the North works so well is how rooted it is in a very specific landscape, the Lake District in Cumbria in the north of England. The region colors not only the setting but the disposition of the characters -- individual freedom may not make it to the future, but regional differences do -- as well as the flavor of the novel's sentences. Take this description as the novel's heroine, Sister, leaves town:

Past the settlement border, in the lower area, the roads had deteriorated. They were much worse than I had imagined. In their years of redundancy they had sagged and rucked. Whole sections had been pulled away by the floods. They felt loose underfoot, like scree.

It's the "rucked" and "scree" I like. Hall never overdoes it -- you never feel like you're being forced to eat an Anglo-Saxon dictionary -- but she has a lovely, aware way of making the prose fit the landscape.

And when the landscape is described it's with a beautiful, exacting simplicity:

An owl was flying over the grassland, sweeping down towards the ground and then up. Its white, clock-like face hovered gracefully, while its wings worked hard and silently in the air. For a second I caught a reflection in its eye, a weird flash of yellow-green, like a battery light flaring on then off again.

In that same back-of-the-book Q & A, Hall is asked to describe "the importance of Cumbria in your work," and she answers:

My agent and editor have coined this phrase for my writing -- "geo-fiction" -- because landscapes feature so strongly in the novels, be it Morecambe Bay, New York, or Cumbria. I keep returning to the north of England in my work though. It's difficult to say what it is about it that I find so compelling-- but I don't think it's the fictive romantic notion of the Lake land. I don't suffer from any romantic illusions about my home turf (stillborn lambs and filthy rains aren't all that sublime), though I don't deny its drama. I suppose being brought up in such a remarkable, natural, and feral place -- my home was very remote and I spent most of my time outdoors, so you could say the land in part raised me -- I now feel beholden to include it in my work.

RELATED: Listen to the Bat Segundo podcast with Sarah Hall.

Posted by About Last Night on July 3, 2008 12:47 PM | Permalink

DVD

Peter Grimes (Decca). In 1969 Benjamin Britten conducted a fully staged studio performance of his most popular opera for the BBC, with Peter Pears singing the title role that he had created a quarter-century earlier. Now that telecast has been released on home video for the first time ever, and it's a stunner, a handsomely staged, unexpectedly intimate production that shows us exactly how Pears interpreted the role that made him famous. Britten's conducting is magnetically compelling, just as it is in the studio recording that he and Pears had made a decade earlier, but you will not soon forget the experience of seeing Pears as Grimes. This is one of four DVDs released as part of the new Britten-Pears Collection, and the others, including a similarly memorable 1966 film of Billy Budd, are no less essential--but Grimes is the place to start (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on July 3, 2008 1:55 PM | Permalink

CAAF: Ovidian query (updated)

I have a question, and I'm hoping one of you kind readers can help me out. Wondering, which translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is this snatch of "Jason and Medea" from?:

So she waited three nights till the moon came full and the round circle shone brightly down on the world, and then she went out of the house in flowing robes and barefoot, hair streaming over her shoulders; all alone into the midnight stillness, while the birds and beasts and men reposed in deepest slumber, with never a stir in the hedges, never a rustle in the silent leaves, never a motion of air, only the glitter of starlight.

I came across it a while back but haven't been able to track down its source. I have Allen Mandelbaum's translation, which renders the same section this way:

The moon was three nights short of rounding out
its horns. But when its circle was complete
and shone in full upon the earth, then she,
in a loose robe, barefoot, her hair uncombed
and unadorned, went out to wander through
the silences of midnight. Men, birds, beasts--
were all held fast by deep tranquility.
The hedge did not murmur, and the leaves
Not stir; the humid air was motionless.
Only the stars were glittering...

If you know the source of the top one, please shoot an email my way (caaf at artsjournal dot com).

UPDATE: It's the Rolfe Humphries translation -- thanks, Dave Lull!

Posted by About Last Night on July 3, 2008 2:33 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"New order of the ages" did we say?
If it looks none too orderly today,
'Tis a confusion it was ours to start
So in it have to take courageous part.
No one of honest feeling would approve
A ruler who pretended not to love
A turbulence he had the better of.

Robert Frost, "For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration"

Posted by About Last Night on July 4, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Artistic elephantiasis

Why is American art so big? The answer, of course, is that some of it isn't, a fact of which I was recently reminded by Melville House's nifty little Art of the Novella paperback series, whose fourteen well-chosen titles include Henry James' The Lesson of the Master, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and Edith Wharton's The Touchstone, miniature masterpieces all. Even in America, small can be beautiful.

Be that as it may, we do seem to have a thing for Great Big Art in this country, and while some of our jumbo art is memorable, even extraordinary, much of it would profit from being put on a diet. I liked Tracy Letts' August: Osage County a lot, but I seem to have been the only drama critic in New York to have suggested that this three-and-a-half-hour monster is too long for its own good:

There's a catch, and it's a huge one: The hour-long first act is a pretentious piece of superfluous exposition that could and should have been cut. I suppose I ought not to suggest that you come late (nudge, nudge), but if you do choose to see the whole thing, take my word that it gets better--a whole lot better--after the first intermission.

All this, needless to say, is the subject of my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, in which I speculate on the causes of the giantism with which so much of our art is afflicted. Pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and read all about it.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on July 4, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Not at work

I came roaring back to New York Monday afternoon and promptly fired off an e-mail to my editor at The Wall Street Journal telling her what actors I'd be mentioning in today's review of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Seconds later she fired back an admirably terse reply that read as follows: "Look at your calendar."

Duh.

Since there's no Wall Street Journal today, I'll be reviewing the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in next Friday's Journal. And instead of staying in town to see a show, I'm going to have lunch with a colleague, then going straight from the restaurant to Penn Station, where I'll catch a train for Connecticut and Mrs. T. We'll be hitting the road next Wednesday for parts north, about which more in due course. In the meantime, I'm soooo out of here.

Happy Fourth of July!

Posted by About Last Night on July 4, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

MUSEUM

J.M.W. Turner (Metropolitan Museum, up through Sept. 21). The Met's 140-piece Turner retrospective, the first full-scale look at Turner's work ever to be mounted in America, is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, a priceless opportunity to track the evolution of the nineteenth-century English painter whose late canvases (generously represented in this show) march right up to the very brink of abstraction. Like most blockbuster shows, this one is far too much of a muchness, but if you can stand in front of a painting like this without being thrilled to the marrow, you're looking in the wrong direction (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on July 4, 2008 8:24 AM | Permalink

BOOK

Elaine Equi, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, $18). This effervescent collection, which gathers two decades of Equi's work with Coffee House Press as well as a handful of early poems, is one of those happy books that you can open to just about any page and find something to delight. Of her work, Equi has said, "I like the fact that for the most part, my poems are pretty accessible." And it's true; there's a Rumi-esque directness to the work here, as well as a playfulness and wit, that's wonderfully light-footed and sure (CAAF).

Posted by About Last Night on July 6, 2008 6:14 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

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

TT: Men at work (VII)

I came back to New York from my last reviewing trip and found on my kitchen table a package from Subito Music, Paul Moravec's publisher. It contained a printed copy of the complete working draft of the piano-vocal score of The Letter, the opera that Paul and I are writing together. I'd already gone over every measure of The Letter time and again, but it's one thing to read a score on a computer screen and another to hold in your hands a bound volume whose cover reads as follows:

Paul Moravec
THE LETTER
An Opera in Eight Scenes
Libretto by Terry Teachout
After the play by W. Somerset Maugham

What once was not quite real has become solid and touchable, and the fact that the Santa Fe Opera will be premiering The Letter a year from now seems less fantastic and more believable.

Later this month Paul and I will fly out to Santa Fe to see four of the five productions that the company is mounting this season. One of them, The Marriage of Figaro, was staged by Jonathan Kent, the man who will be directing The Letter next summer. I stood on the stage of the Crosby Theater two months ago, but I've never seen an opera performed there, and Paul and I expect to make some changes in The Letter after immersing ourselves in Figaro, Falstaff, Billy Budd and Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater. Once we're finished, Subito will print a revised edition of the piano-vocal score that will be sent out to the cast and production team, and Paul will start orchestrating The Letter, a back-breaking job that will take him several months to finish.

At that point the main part of my work will be done, and I'll turn my energies to seeing Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong into print. Harcourt plans to publish Rhythm Man next spring, and after the hoopla, such as it is, has died down, I'll go back to Santa Fe to help prepare for the premiere of The Letter. Operas, like plays, tend to get revised at the last minute, and even though this one is far ahead of schedule, I have little doubt that my services will be required when The Letter goes into rehearsal.

gscat-84-Somerset-Maugham-%28.jpg I wonder what Somerset Maugham would have thought of my libretto for The Letter, which follows the structural outline of his 1927 play with reasonable faithfulness but is otherwise radically different in tone, text, and detail from what he wrote. The impetus for these changes came from Paul, who was concerned from the start about the coldness with which Maugham portrayed his characters, especially Leslie Crosbie, the play's murderous anti-heroine. Maugham, of course, was a notorious cynic, though he affected to pretend otherwise. "If it's cynical to look truth in the face and exercise common sense in the affairs of life, then certainly I'm a cynic and odious if you like," says the narrator of one of his short stories. The problem is that opera isn't about common sense. "Opera isn't a cynical medium," Paul told me early on. "It's a lyrical medium. These people have to have a reason to be singing. If they don't, they'll look silly up there."

Somewhere along the way Paul sent me a quotation from Gary Schmidgall's Literature as Opera in which Schmidgall talks about Tchaikovsky's operatic version of Yevgeny Onegin: "The need to deflate, ridicule, and debunk that is present in Pushkin's verse is replaced by Tchaikovsky's need to sympathize with, draw near to, and grasp the innermost passions he is setting to music." I saw at once what Paul was getting at, and thereafter I did everything I could to open up the constricted emotional world of The Letter, whose limitations remind me of something that Maugham wrote about himself in The Summing Up, his 1938 memoir: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed."

By the time we were done, Paul and I had created a free-standing, fully independent work of art whose emotional climate is far removed from that of Maugham's play, and even more so from the hard-nosed short story on which it is based. In "The Letter," which predates the stage version by three years, Leslie Crosbie comes off as--to put it mildly--a real piece of work:

Her face was no longer human. It was distorted with cruelty, and rage and pain. You would never have thought that this quiet, refined woman was capable of such a fiendish passion. Mr. Joyce took a step backwards. He was absolutely aghast at the sight of her. It was not a face, it was a gibbering, hideous mask.

Maugham's Leslie would never have sought to explain her unfaithfulness to her husband in the way that ours does:

Imagine a woman
Alone in the jungle,
Alone with the servants,
Nowhere to go, nothing to do
But watch the clock and knit.
Sick of the heat,
Sick of the smell,
Sick of being a planter's wife,
I was sick with loneliness.
You had your work,
You had your friends--
And I had Geoff!
He was my life,
My love,
And then...
I shot him.

Maugham was a man of the theater, that most empirical of art forms, and he also liked opera and knew a fair amount about it, so I assume--perhaps wrongly--that he would have understood why Paul and I felt the need to change his play in the ways that we did. Nor was I surprised by the distance that we traveled in writing The Letter. I've written quite a lot about opera over the years, and in "Brand-Name Opera," a 1998 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, I analyzed the weaknesses of André Previn's operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire, one of which is that the libretto fails to add anything to Tennessee Williams' play:

Because the play is so famous--and because the Williams estate required him to do so--Philip Littell, the librettist, stuck closely both to its broad structural outlines and to its verbal essence. "The trick," Littell has said, "is to make [the audience] think, 'Why'd they hire a librettist?'" In this he has succeeded; despite extensive cuts and countless small textual changes, anyone who has seen the play will find Littell's libretto to be impressively true to its spirit.

But to turn a famous piece of literature into an effective opera libretto entails far more than merely compressing the original text. Every great opera based on a familiar literary source involves an imaginative transformation of the original, one that typically goes far beyond the setting of old words to new music. In Verdi's Otello and Falstaff, Shakespeare's English words are freely translated into the Italian of Arrigo Boito; in Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin, Alexander Pushkin's verse novel is opened up into a series of "lyrical scenes"; in Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's narrative voice is jettisoned in favor of dialogue, almost none of which appears in the original novella.

In the absence of such a transformation, one is almost inevitably left with an impression of mere tautology; and that is the case with Streetcar. Lotfi Mansouri, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, had long wanted to turn Williams's play into an opera, and approached several composers before settling on Previn. "I cornered Stephen Sondheim," he has recalled, "and he said, 'Oh, it's such a good play--it doesn't need music.' Well, you can say that about Shakespeare's Othello too." But Boito's Otello is a good libretto precisely because it is so different from Shakespeare's Othello. By contrast, Littell's Streetcar is so much like the original play that it is difficult at first glance to see why André Previn felt the need to set it to music.

I had no idea ten years ago that I would someday be putting those words into practice.

Needless to say, I'm no Boito--I think that Otello and Falstaff are the greatest opera libretti ever written--but I also think that he would have understood what I was trying to do in writing The Letter. While it's not for me to say whether I succeeded, I feel safe in saying that Paul has set my words with the utmost effectiveness, and I hope that when the time comes, our audiences will find them worthy of his music.

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

TT: Almanac

"Those who claim to enjoy music fully only if their eyes are closed do not hear it better than if their eyes were open, but the absence of visual distractions allows them to abandon themselves, under the lulling influence of sounds, to vague reveries--and it is these which they love, far more than music itself."

Igor Stravinsky, Autobiography

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

TT: Doing it for Randolph Scott

Attention, film buffs! For those of you who, like me, treasure the Hollywood western at its smartest and most aesthetically compelling, a piece of stop-press news has been eddying through the Internet for the past month or so, courtesy of the in-house blog of Tapeworks Recording Studios in Hartford, Connecticut. It finally caught up with me yesterday:

It was a B Movie bonanza in Tapeworks today as noted film authority Jeanine Basinger narrated a companion DVD track to the Budd Boetticher Western, The Tall T, starring Randolph Scott and Maureen O'Sullivan.
This is the first in a series of Boetticher releases that will comprise a box set of the directors distinctive works.

A regular presence in the Hartford recording studio, Prof. Basinger has provided commentary on numerous titles while viewing the films with Chief Engineer Bill Ahearn at Tapeworks and simultaneously with a Hollywood production company on the digital patch.

Jeanine Basinger is Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies and Founder and Curator of the Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.

For those of you just joining us, I've been fulminating for years about the fact that only one of the six classic films starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher, Seven Men from Now, has been transferred to DVD. The Teachout Reader contains an essay about the Boetticher-Scott westerns (you can read it here) in which I praise them at length and in the strongest possible terms:

The clean, spare look of the Boetticher-Scott films is mirrored in their no-nonsense scripts. Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, both written by Burt Kennedy, are for all intents and purposes the same movie as Seven Men from Now--the basic plot mechanism is recycled from film to film, along with a few choice snippets of dialogue--while Decision at Sundown and The Tall T, the former doctored by Kennedy and the latter adapted by him from a novel by Elmore Leonard, arise from different situations but develop in similar ways. More often than not, Scott plays the part of a solitary, vengeful drifter who is searching for a man has wronged him, usually by murdering his wife. In the course of his travels, he meets an unhappily married woman, to whom he is powerfully and illicitly attracted, and a villain who is charming and courageous--a hero gone bad, in other words. The villain proves to be looking for the same man as Scott, but their interests are in conflict, forcing them into a climactic showdown.
What sounds repetitive on paper proves miraculously varied in practice. Just as Degas never tired of the ballet dancers he painted time and again, so does Boetticher come up with ever-fresh ways to frame his players among the sun-scorched rocks of Lone Pine, finding painfully austere beauty in that least seductive of landscapes....

Now coming to a DVD player near you? It sure looks like it--and about damn time, too.

I'll keep you posted.

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

BOOK

Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (Counterpoint, $16). All of the adjectives Sybille Bedford's writing brings to mind belong to the same family: sharp, acute, penetrating, piercing, and so on. In her most famous novel, two marriages, inauspicious in different ways, bind together the fates of three families in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany. How could it have taken me this long to discover Bedford? Why isn't a writer with her observational powers, slicing wit, and historical grasp--a woman whose work no less a cutting edge than Dorothy Parker found "almost terrifyingly brilliant"--better known? The curious can start with A Legacy, whose certainties and mysteries stand in perfect balance (OGIC).

Posted by About Last Night on July 8, 2008 1:30 AM | Permalink

TT: Due to circumstances...

I just found out that the alternate URL for this site, www.terryteachout.com, has been out of order for the past few days. Don't know why, and it's hard to get anything fixed in July, but rest assured that we're working on it.

In the meantime, you can always view About Last night by going to www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight, so please spread the word.

Posted by About Last Night on July 8, 2008 9:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible."

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

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

TT: Snapshot

Nat "King" Cole sings "Sweet Lorraine," accompanied by Coleman Hawkins and the Oscar Peterson Trio, with Herb Ellis on guitar and Ray Brown on bass:

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

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

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

I'm currently weaning myself off coffee so consider the post title above as suffused with longing. I've spent the last couple days at one cup a day (down from a steady day-long drip) and so feel a little flattened and pre-lingual and Flowers for Algernonish. Yet in the midst of the bleakness a few animating things present themselves:

• The portfolio of poems by Jack Spicer included in the July/August issue of Poetry, the contents of which the magazine has available online (scroll down). I wasn't familiar with Spicer's work before -- Lowell was, but he knows his California poets -- but I'm completely enamored. A couple to explore are "Any fool can get into an ocean..." and "Imagine Lucifer."

The magazine notes that a volume of Spicer's collected poetry, My Vocabulary Did This To Me (that title is taken from the poet's reported last words), is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press this fall. A collection of his lectures on poetry, The House That Jack Built, has already been out for some time. You can read an excerpt of one of the lectures here, although I recommend reading this introduction along with it as well as this brief bio of Spicer.

• A while back Rockslinga had a sampling of quotations from Zadie Smith's essay on novel-writing in the June Believer. I finally picked up a copy of the magazine and I'm so glad I did. Originally given as a lecture at Columbia University, the essay's one of the most helpful pieces I've read about long-haul fiction writing, a nice blend of practical advice with the abstractly inspiring. Unfortunately, it's only partly available online, which doesn't do you much good at your desk right now, does it? So until you can procure your own copy, you can read Smith's very fine essay on Kafka in the current issue of New York Review of Books.

Smatterings elsewhere:
• As the future of the L.A. Times Book Review is considered, Mark "TEV" Sarvas proposes a possible new incarnation for the review as an online powerhouse a la The Guardian. Discussion is invited in the comments, and I point it out as it's interesting to consider how papers will/ should adapt their book coverage in the future. (Aside: If you're not reading it already, the L.A. Times book blog, Jacket Copy, is excellent.)

• Fernham provides a report on a lecture she attended on the Borges translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (short version: liberties were taken).

Posted by About Last Night on July 9, 2008 12:38 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

The critic leaves at curtain fall
To find, in starting to review it,
He scarcely saw the play at all
For starting to review it.

E.B. White, "Definitions"

Posted by About Last Night on July 10, 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, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)
• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on July 10, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?"

Franz Grillparzer, Notebooks and Diaries

Posted by About Last Night on July 11, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Happiness on the Hudson

Most of today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to a report on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's productions of Cymbeline and Twelfth Night, followed by a few testy remarks about Lincoln Center Festival's presentation of The Bacchae. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

What makes a festival festive? To answer this question, hop in your car and head for Garrison, the small town across the Hudson River from West Point that is home to my favorite outdoor summer Shakespeare festival. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1987, is that rarity of rarities, an artistic enterprise that gets everything right. Impressive as its productions are, the real secret of the festival's success is that it offers its patrons a total experience that adds up to more than the sum of its admirable parts. The shows are bright and lively, the performers engaging, the setting gorgeous, the atmosphere joyous. I won't say that it's impossible to have a bad time at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival--some people are inexplicably resistant to pleasure--but I've been going to Garrison for four summers now, and my annual visit has become one of the most eagerly awaited dates on my theatrical calendar.

It's impossible to talk about the festival without first mentioning the site. The company performs in a huge tent pitched on the lawn of the Boscobel House, a lovingly restored Federal-style 1808 mansion located on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The performances get underway just as the evening sun slips behind the mountains of the Hudson Highlands. Wise playgoers dine on the lawn an hour or so before curtain time--tasty catered picnic baskets can be ordered in advance--and enjoy a spectacle that has been capturing the imagination of American landscape painters for the better part of two centuries.

Sunset on the Hudson can be a hard act to follow, but Hudson Valley pulls it off. The company's productions are models of uncondescending theatrical populism, reaching out to contemporary audiences without watering down Shakespeare beyond recognition....

I've never found Lincoln Center Festival to be especially festive, though it often presents memorable performances. Part of the problem--maybe most of it--is that the festival takes place in the middle of a bustling, art-crammed city, thus making it difficult to turn off the hum and buzz of urban life and immerse yourself in its wide-ranging fare. Sometimes, though, the fare itself is the problem. This year's festival, for instance, opened with the National Theatre of Scotland's tiresomely transgressive production of "The Bacchae," which struck me as a good working definition of Eurotrash at its trashiest. Picture Alan Cumming in a kilt, being lowered to the stage by his ankles and flashing his buttocks all the way down. Then imagine him as an ultra-campy Dionysus in drag who sashays through a wink-wink-nudge-nudge rewrite of Euripides' classic Greek tragedy ("Don't be so coy, big boy") in which the chorus consists of nine school-of-Motown backup singers decked out in fire-engine red. Get the idea? I did--it took me about 30 seconds--and spent the rest of the night looking at my watch....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on July 11, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Well, you could be serious and still have fun. In fact, he believed it was the secret of a happy life, if anybody wanted to know a secret."

Elmore Leonard, LaBrava

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

TT: Here and there

I just got back to Connecticut from a hectic two-state reviewing trip and am returning to New York on Tuesday for a few frenzied days of work. I haven't had time to blog, but I'll try to post an update on my recent activities tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday.

Till then.

Posted by About Last Night on July 14, 2008 12:28 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There is an enthusiastic reflection that is of the greatest value if one does not allow oneself to be carried away by it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

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

CAAF: John Keats, John Keats, John, please put your scarf on

Is it just me, or is John Keats everywhere right now? In her excellent Believer essay on novel-writing, Zadie Smith talks about her early identification with the poet and the influence of his example:

I was about fourteen when I heard John Keats in there, and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class--though how archaic that must sound, here in America. I knew he wasn't working-class, exactly, and of course he wasn't black--but in rough outline his situation felt closer to mine than the other writers I'd come across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh. That was very important to me--I think you may have to be English to understand how important. To me, Keats offered the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked Apprentices Welcome Here. Keats went abut his work just like an apprentice: he took a kind of M.F.A. of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower-middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence--he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic from, in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it's there, famously, in his reading of Chapman's Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. When I'm writing, especially during those horrible first hundred pages, I often think of Keats. The term "role model" is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a mode kept somewhere in mind. So I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling growing, writing many poems that made him blush, and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

Also stoking the current Keats-biquity is the publication of Posthumous Keats, which Adam Kirsch reviewed in the New Yorker and which I'm reading right now and adore (so I'm not so much being shadowed by the poet as carrying him around in my purse).

Posted by About Last Night on July 15, 2008 7:52 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Morning coffee*

• Maud finds the online annotated Moby Dick. Suitable for reading on your iPhone during passive commutes then rising exalted to peer over your fellow subway passengers.

• Not a fresh link but of interest if, like me, you're a fan of Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North: Galleycat's interview with Hall where she discusses the novel's start as a short story.

* Still a cruel reminder of what once was. But I will not surrender to "morning green tea."

Posted by About Last Night on July 15, 2008 8:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"How much time, approximately, can a worker in a hectic, speeded-up world give to his work and be a sane, all-round, informed, and recreated citizen?"

Mary Barnett Gilson, What's Past Is Prologue

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

TT: Overpressed with sail

It's too hot and I'm too busy.

Later.

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

TT: Snapshot

Jackson Pollock, filmed by Hans Namuth in 1951 and accompanied by the music of Morton Feldman:

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

Posted by About Last Night on July 16, 2008 10:39 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead."

Edward Hoagland, "The Ridge-Slope Fox and The Knife-Thrower"

Posted by About Last Night on July 17, 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)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in alternating repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on July 17, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Morning coffee

• Jessa Crispin considers the glut of biographies out there about the various members of the James family and considers the omissions to be found in the latest bio of the family, House of Wits. That biography, written by Paul Fisher, also received an unfavorable review from Hermione Lee.

• La belle et la bête: Eloisa James writes interestingly about the spate of recent romances featuring beastly metamorphoses. (Via Galleycat.)

• And the Translators Association of the Society of Authors (good old TAOTSOA) gives us its list of the 50 outstanding translations of the last 50 years and validates my preference for the Michael Glenny translation of Master and the Margarita. (Via The Lit Saloon.)

Posted by About Last Night on July 17, 2008 7:56 AM | Permalink

TT: Jo Stafford, R.I.P.

Jo Stafford, who died yesterday, is mostly forgotten now, save by those who were young a half-century ago, but back then she was one of the most popular singers in America, a wholesome beauty with a smooth, perfectly produced voice who sold millions and millions of records. Some of them were silly novelties, others bland period ballads, but when she had a good song to sing, nobody sang it better.

Stafford dealt in reassurance, a commodity much appreciated during World War II and in the Age of Anxiety that followed it, which may explain why she is not nearly so well remembered as Frank Sinatra (with whom she sang in Tommy Dorsey's band) or the hotter, sexier canaries of the Fifties. Her tasteful singing was rhythmically fluid without ever sounding self-consciously "jazzy," and her warm mezzo-soprano voice had a maternal quality that eased the troubled heart, though it didn't do much for the critics of the day. "I never made it with the critics," she once told Gene Lees. "I think what the critics didn't like was that it was simply singing."

Stafford went into semi-retirement in 1966. By then most of her records were out of print, and when I wrote a piece for Mirabella in 1994 occasioned by the release of a three-CD box set of her old Columbia recordings, she was very much a figure of the past. That hasn't changed. Most of the collections of her singles that are currently available are junky hit-oriented anthologies that give no sense of what she was like at her best. Fortunately Corinthian, her own label, put out two excellent CDs, Big Band Sound and Jo + Jazz, in which she sings blue-chip standards accompanied by some of the greatest jazz and pop instrumentalists of the Swing Era. Jazz musicians loved Stafford's voice and knew her worth--Lester Young was one of her biggest fans--and were always glad to play for her.

Stafford was only a vague memory of my childhood when a septuagenarian friend of mine played me a Columbia 78 of her version of "Early Autumn" a decade and a half ago. (It's on Big Band Sound, and you can also download it from iTunes.) The record, arranged by her beloved husband Paul Weston, couldn't be simpler. Stafford is accompanied by a clarinet choir and a soft-spoken rhythm section, and she sings Johnny Mercer's haunting lyric in the most direct and unmannered way imaginable:

There's a dance pavilion in the rain
All shuttered down
A winding country lane
All russet brown
A frosty window pane
Shows me a town grown lonely.

That deceptively uncomplicated-sounding performance hit me with the force of revelation. All at once I knew that good old Jo Stafford was a great artist, and I resolved to spread the word about her artistry in any way I possibly could. A couple of years later I wrote about her in Mirabella, and after that I made a point of mentioning Stafford whenever I had occasion to write about golden-age popular song and its interpreters, but never again did I have occasion to write a full-length piece about her. I wish I had, and I wish I'd sent it to her while she was still alive. Perhaps she would have enjoyed knowing that her quiet, unpretentious art was still giving pleasure long after her fame had faded.

* * *

The Daily Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, New York Times and Washington Post now all have long, well-informed obituaries.

Chris Albertson passes along this snippet from an interview he did with Lester Young in 1958.

YOUNG You know, I can tell you this, really, my favorite singer is Kay Starr. No, that's the wrong name. What's that other lady's name? Her husband has a band.

ALBERTSON It's not Jo Stafford?

YOUNG There you are! Yeah, I'll go there.

ALBERTSON Jo Stafford is your favorite singer?

YOUNG Yeah, and Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. And I'm through.

ALBERTSON But Jo Stafford does not sing jazz, does she?

YOUNG No, but I hear her voice and the sound and the way she puts things on.

Enough said.

Posted by About Last Night on July 17, 2008 10:08 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity."

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

Posted by About Last Night on July 18, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Hating the new

Joe Queenan, who can be a very funny man, published a piece in the Guardian last week in which he declared himself to be unalterably opposed to modern music of all kinds:

In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, concert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they'll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they'll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

My editor at The Wall Street Journal sent me a link to Queenan's piece, accompanied by the suggestion that I might possibly want to write a "Sightings" column about "Admit It, You're as Bored as I Am." Boy, was he ever right. Pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what came of it.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on July 18, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Songs of themselves

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column features three musicals, one on Broadway and two out of town: [title of show], a Vermont production of The Light in the Piazza, and an Oklahoma! in upstate New York. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

The ultimate backstage musical--and I don't mean that as a compliment--has come to Broadway. "[title of show]" is a show about itself, a 90-minute mini-musical whose authors, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, play themselves and whose subject is how the show in which they are appearing came to be written and produced. If all this sounds claustrophobically self-indulgent, there's a reason: I don't know when I've seen a musical that seemed more pleased with itself.

Art about art usually is self-indulgent, but it doesn't have to be--so long as its self-reflexiveness has wider implications. The first two-thirds of "[title of show]" fails to pass that test. It basically amounts to one long inside joke about theater, a daisy chain of glib references to moldy Broadway flops (anybody who can remember "Censored Scenes from King Kong" needs to run right out and get a life) and stale postmodern gimmickry (it is not clever to shout "Key change!" when the song you're singing changes keys). A full hour crawls by before "[title of show]" cuts out the coyness and gets serious....

Everything missing from "[title of show]" is present in abundance in Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza," which has just been revived by the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in a brand-new chamber version for eight actors and five musicians. (The original version calls for 18 actors and 15 musicians.) Mr. Guettel has shrunk the show's scale without diminishing its passionate romanticism--if anything, it plays better this way--and I won't be at all surprised if the new "Piazza" becomes the standard performing version of the first great musical of the post-Sondheim era.

It helps, of course, that this intimate production, directed with intelligence and grace by Steve Stettler, is so very fine. In certain ways Mr. Stettler's "Piazza" is actually superior to Lincoln Center Theater's 2005 Broadway production...

Richard Rodgers, Mr. Guettel's grandfather, was a pretty fair tunesmith himself, and many of his shows profit from the same intimate treatment that the Weston Playhouse is giving to "The Light in the Piazza." I'm not altogether sure that "Oklahoma!" is one of them, but the Hangar Theatre's small-scale revival of the most enduringly popular of the five hit musicals that Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II is still an unpretentiously likable piece of work....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on July 18, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Fret not

I'm pleased (and not a little relieved) to announce that www.terryteachout.com, the alternate URL for "About Last Night," has been repaired at last and is functioning once more. If you're in the habit of using that easy-to-remember address instead of www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight, our official URL, you may now return to your old ways.

Sorry about that.

Posted by About Last Night on July 19, 2008 8:24 AM | Permalink

CD

Cy Walter, Rodgers Revisited: Cy Walter Plays Richard Rodgers Compositions (Collectables). Two years after I heralded the first CD reissue of the long-forgotten recordings of Cy Walter, the man who turned cocktail piano into an art, a sequel has finally come along. Walters' 1956 recital of thirteen songs by Richard Rodgers, originally released by Atlantic, is as suave and elegant a display of piano playing as has ever been committed to disc--but don't be fooled by the high gloss. Alec Wilder said in his original liner notes that "anyone who has heard his own songs played by Cy immediately has a greater respect for his own work....though utterly respectful of the composers and songwriters whose music he plays, he is also highly complex both rhythmically and harmonically in his interpretations of their music, all the while maintaining a constant balance of delicacy and sensitiveness." Listen to "The Gentleman is a Dope" and you'll hear what Wilder meant. More, please! (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on July 19, 2008 12:12 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

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

TT: Neither crunchy nor thumpy

My friend Ethan Iverson, who plays piano with the Bad Plus, read my recent Wall Street Journal column on modern music, in which I mentioned in passing that "I don't go in for crunch-and-thump music, nor do I care for the over-and-over-and-over-again minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass, which puts me to sleep." He promptly issued the following challenge on his blog:

Here's an open invitation to Terry--who, after all, is a current collaborator with modernist composer Paul Moravec: what about a list of classical music since 1950 that he finds interesting? It should be a list of music that is neither twelve-tone or minimalist, nor particularly "crunch and thump."

Here goes, straight off the top of my head. I've included links to currently available recordings of all ten pieces, which can also be downloaded from iTunes:

• Benjamin Britten, The Turn of the Screw (1954)

• Aaron Copland, Piano Fantasy (1957)

• Ned Rorem, Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano (1959)

• Leonard Bernstein, Chichester Psalms (1965)

• Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 11 (1966)

• Malcolm Arnold, Symphony for Brass Instruments (1978)

• George Tsontakis, String Quartet No. 3 ("Coraggio") (1986)

• Morten Lauridsen, O Magnum Mysterium (1994)

• Lowell Liebermann, Piccolo Concerto (1996)

• Paul Moravec, The Time Gallery (2000)

Each of these pieces is more or less tonal (though Britten's opera and the Copland Fantasy also make use of serial-type techniques). Beyond that, though, they don't have a lot in common other than that I happen to like them all very much. Some are immediately accessible, while others are tougher nuts to crack. I chose them to suggest the breadth of musical possibility that has been available to postwar classical composers whose language is essentially traditional.

Over to you, Ethan!

UPDATE: Ethan replies.

George Hunka expands.

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

TT, OGIC, and CAAF: Actually, we're all a little fried

Into every blog a little chaos must occasionally fall, but never before have all three of us been under the crunch at one and the same time. On Sunday Terry and Mrs. T hit the road for a solid month of out-of-town reviewing. Laura will soon be departing Chicago for a couple of weeks, and Carrie is currently snowed under with cash-generating work.

Needless to say, none of this means that we're closing up shop. There'll always be a daily almanac entry, a Wednesday "Snapshot," and the usual theater-related postings on Thursdays and Fridays. Nevertheless, regular readers should be forewarned that things are likely to be a bit spotty around here from now until the end of August. All three of us will post as often as we can, which might end up being more often than we expect, but we don't want to make any unkeepable promises.

In short, expect no miracles, but do keep looking in on us--you'll never go away completely empty-handed. And enjoy your summer!

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

TT: Almanac

"The mention of rent put Frank on his mettle. 'That's all right, dear,' he said; 'you pay when you can.'

"Each time that he spoke this familiar phrase, and sometimes it was as often as twenty times in a week, he felt overcome by the sadness of the situation. It was seldom, he knew, that any good would come of his sympathy, but it was the hopelessness, the endless hopelessness of the lives with which he had surrounded himself, that awoke his compassion. Frank Rammage's attitude could hardly be called sentimental, for it went farther than mere feeling--he regarded the dishonest and depraved as almost sacred. As usual, however, the little scene had satisfied the mixture of bullying and masochism that lay on the surface of his strange, Dostoyevskian philanthropy. He felt quite jolly."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

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

TT: Almanac

"I never look at anything that isn't beautiful these days unless duty compels me."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

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

TT: Snapshot

Arturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony in a 1952 performance of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

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

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

TT: Almanac

"A great actress, but like most of them had no real idea of what she was playing. Actually she'd have been a better actress if she'd been a bit more of a fool. She'd have just acted instead of trying to make sense of her parts."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Posted by About Last Night on July 24, 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)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTON, VT.:
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

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

TT: Almanac

"He disliked pretty girls who showed hysteria, particularly in the form of strong opinions."

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Posted by About Last Night on July 25, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Wicked laughter

Today's entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

OthelloSCO08KSRPA_431.sized.jpg Part of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is that his plays are so rarely all of a piece. Even the most raucously funny of his comedies are shot through with sweetness, just as his tragedies usually make room for laughter--sometimes macabre, sometimes nervous, sometimes just plain silly. Not all directors are alert to the comic aspect of Shakespeare's tragedies, though, which is one of the many reasons why I was so impressed by Shakespeare & Company's first attempt at "Othello." Staged by Tony Simotes, one of the company's founding members, this "Othello" is lean, clean, detailed but unfussy and fast on its feet. Mr. Simotes' actors wisely play many of their lines for laughs, thus making it all the more horrifying when the curtain falls on a stageful of corpses.

The tone is set by the Iago of Michael Hammond, a deceptively affable soldier-bureaucrat who keeps his seething ambition on the tightest possible rein. Throughout the first part of the evening, he might well have wandered in from a production of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Only in his soliloquies does he give the audience a glimpse of the green-eyed monster hiding behind his mask of urbanity. No less deceptive is John Douglas Thompson's Othello, who speaks Shakespeare's verse with terrific dash and elegance (and the faintest of African accents, a nice touch). Mr. Thompson comes across as a poised, aristocratic Othello, the last man in the world whom you'd expect to end up strangling his naïve young wife in a mad fit of jealousy....

LadiesManSCO08KSPRA_405.sized.jpg Shakespeare & Company, which performs throughout the year on a lovely three-stage campus nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, doesn't limit itself to the classics. The last of the current season's three mainstage offerings is "The Ladies Man," a free English-language adaptation of Georges Feydeau's "The Ladies Dressmaker" by Charles Morey, who also created the excellent stage version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" produced last month by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Mr. Morey has deliberately softened the edge of Feydeau's hard-headed 1885 comedy of sexual manners, turning it into a friendly five-door farce in the good-humored American manner.

Mr. Morey's adaptation (which also borrows from Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear") starts off slowly and contains a few too many obviously jokey jokes: "Five hundred dressmakers in Paris and you had to pick this one--no wonder the French invented farce!" But the dramatic gears mesh as soon as the doors start slamming, and the result is a most effective vehicle for the talents of Kevin G. Coleman, Elizabeth Aspenlieder and Jonathan Croy, the director and stars of the brilliant production of Tom Stoppard's "Rough Crossing" that Shakespeare & Company put on last summer. Mr. Coleman screws the comic tension up to an excitingly shrill pitch in the second act, then discharges it in an explosion of inspired craziness....

* * *

Read the whole thing here, including my equally favorable remarks on Tina Packer's staging of All's Well That End's Well.

Posted by About Last Night on July 25, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as they are. They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence or scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressible, good-humored, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them."

Tom Stoppard, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (courtesy of The Rat)

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

TT: Travels with Mrs. T (I)

I've been to so many different places in the past few weeks that I sometimes have to check my datebook to be sure of where I am. At the moment I seem to be in Tesuque, New Mexico (pop. 909), home of Tesuque Pueblo. Readers of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop know it as the place to which Archbishop Latour retired to enjoy "that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action":

This period of reflection the Archbishop spent on his little country estate, some four miles north of Santa Fé. Long before his retirement from the cares of the diocese, Father Latour bought those few acres in the red sand-hills near the Tesuque pueblo, and set out an orchard which would be bearing when the time came for him to rest.

Unlike the archbishop, I haven't retired, nor do I expect to spend much time meditating in Tesuque. I've come to New Mexico to spend a few days at the Santa Fe Opera, attending performances of Adriana Mater, Billy Budd, Falstaff and The Marriage of Figaro and conferring with some of the people who'll be involved in next year's premiere of The Letter. I'm staying in the guest house of James McGrath Morris, editor of The Biographer's Craft. Jamie and his wife Patty kindly offered their hospitality when they learned that I'd be in Santa Fe this summer, and I'm glad I took them up on it--I can't imagine a prettier place. I took the Turquoise Trail from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, and I'm still a little dizzy from the beauty of the scenery I saw along the way.

My trip to Santa Fe is an interlude, a stopover between visits to theaters in California. On Saturday Mrs. T and I were in San Diego, where we saw The Merry Wives of Windsor and a rare revival of Samuel Taylor's The Pleasure of His Company at the Old Globe and stayed at the Park Manor Suites, a slightly rundown but wonderfully nutty hotel built in 1926 and conveniently located across the street from Balboa Park, home of the Old Globe.

Mrs. T dropped me off at the San Diego airport yesterday morning, then drove to Laguna Beach to spend a few days visiting a cousin while I take care of opera-related business in Santa Fe. We'll meet again on Friday at Shakespeare Santa Cruz to see Itamar Moses' Bach in Leipzig, Lanford Wilson's Burn This, and our second All's Well That Ends Well of the season (Shakespeare & Company is also performing All's Well in Lenox, Massachusetts).

From Santa Cruz we fly back to Manhattan, change clothes, and see Hair in Central Park. Then we're off again, this time on a hectic two-week swing through Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, about which more as it unfolds.

(First of two parts)

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

TT: Almanac

"Search where you will, near or far, in ancient or modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave more than a passing bow to optimism."

H.L. Mencken, "Joseph Conrad" (courtesy, I blush to admit, of The Rat)

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

TT: Travels with Mrs. T (II)

Where else have I been lately? If you read my Wall Street Journal drama column, you'll know that Mrs. T and I recently paid very happy visits to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York, the Weston Playhouse in Weston, Vermont, and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. We started off, though, by spending two nights in the southwest Catskills purely for our pleasure, without a stage in sight.

Since we were both under the weather when we honeymooned at Ecce Bed and Breakfast last October--weddings will do that to you--I decided to treat Mrs. T to a return visit before embarking on our theater-related travels. The picturesque Ecce, whose Web site accurately describes it as being "perched on a bluff 300 feet above the Upper Delaware River," is the place we like best other than home, not least because Alan Rosenblatt goes out of his way to pamper his guests. I raved about Ecce in this space after staying there for the first time, and since then I've come back as often as possible. When I brought my wife-to-be to Ecce a year ago, we decided on the spot to spend part of our honeymoon there. Would that we'd been feeling better when the great day came, but we made up for it this time around.

When you visit Ecce, by the way, be sure to have dinner up the road at Restaurant 15 Main in Narrowsburg, which is as good a place to eat as you'll find anywhere on or near the East Coast.

From there we drove east, and I went back to work:

• In Garrison we slept across the Hudson River at Storm King Lodge, which has become our regular stopping place whenever I cover the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, partly because it's so cozy and partly because it's a stone's throw from the Storm King Art Center, where we saw a show of lithographs and drawings by Mark di Suvero, who is better known for his large-scale outdoor sculpture.

Mrs. T and I never fail to meet nice people at Storm King Lodge, the first of whom were Hal and Gay Janks, the innkeepers. Hal, who makes a mean omelet, used to play bass trombone with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and is a font of anecdotes about his years in the pit. This year we breakfasted with one of Hal's best friends, a tuba player named Peter Sexauer whose father, amazingly enough, was a member of John Philip Sousa's band. Peter loaned me a copy of Marching Along, Sousa's long-out-of-print 1928 autobiography, which I found so delightful that I'm going to write a "Sightings" column about it next month.

As I mentioned in my Journal review, we also toured the Boscobel Restoration, on whose immaculately kept grounds Hudson Valley Shakespeare is headquartered:

The company performs in a huge tent pitched on the lawn of the Boscobel House, a lovingly restored Federal-style 1808 mansion located on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River....Come early enough in the day to take a tour of Boscobel and you can revel in "'The Glorious Scenery Must Ever Excite': Nineteenth-Century American Paintings of the Hudson Highlands," the first show to be installed in the mansion's new basement art gallery. Many of the 29 canvases and works on paper in this well-curated exhibition portray sites that are located within a 20-mile radius of the Boscobel Restoration.

Go.

• Weston, which is nestled among the Green Mountains of Vermont, is small to the point of invisibility. Perhaps because it's also slightly off the beaten path, Weston has steered clear of the self-conscious italicization that infects so many towns on the New England summer-festival circuit, some of which now resemble nothing so much as theme parks. Unlike them, Weston is what it is--and that's what I like about it.

Mrs. T and I stayed at The Inn at Weston, which is charming, comfortable, and a short walk from the village green where the Weston Playhouse is located. We dined very well at the playhouse's downstairs cafe, whose kitchen is run by Bob and Linda Aldrich, the owners of the inn. At breakfast the next morning we met a pediatric plastic surgeon and amateur musician named June Wu who lives in our New York neighborhood. As if that weren't coincidence enough, June turned out to be a fan of Paul Moravec, my collaborator on The Letter. Small world, isn't it?

• After booking us into various inns in and near Lenox, Mrs. T finally found the perfect place to stay. It takes a minute and a half to drive from the front door of Gateways Inn to the parking lot of Shakespeare & Company, and Tanglewood isn't much farther off. The rooms are unoppressively handsome, the restaurant first rate (and open late, too, making it possible to eat after a show, which can be hard to do in Lenox). The bar is stocked with some two hundred and fifty different single-malt Scotches--I counted six varieties of Glenfiddich alone--and Fabrizio and Rosemary Chiariello, the hosts, will do anything within reason to make you happy.

* * *

As for the present moment, I'm still in Santa Fe and busy as hell, and I expect to remain so until Friday, when I depart for Santa Cruz by way of Albuquerque, Phoenix, and San Francisco. (The city's motto ought to be Santa Fe--you can't get here from there!) So far I have two deadlines, two dinner appointments, three breakfast appointments, and four operas on my calendar.

Later, in other words.

(Second of two parts)

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

TT: Almanac

"Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own."

J.M. Barrie, rectorial address, St Andrew's University, Scotland (May 3, 1922)

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

TT: Snapshot

Mary Martin sings "I'm Flying," from the 1960 NBC telecast of Jerome Robbins' musical version of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan:

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

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

CAAF: 5 x 5 Books For The Swim-Obsessed by Jenny Davidson

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today's installment comes from Jenny Davidson, author of the marvelous new young-adult novel The Explosionist and proprietrix of Light Reading.

In 2007 I fell head over heels in love -- with swimming. This led me to spend as much time as I could in the water, but unfortunately one cannot always be swimming. the insatiable desire for 'swim lit.' It was difficult to narrow my choices down to five -- what about Diana Nyad's Other Shores, Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero and Sherman Chavoor's The Fifty-Meter Jungle: How Olympic Swimmers are Made? What about the complete novels of Chris Crutcher?!? But here's my list, and I hope you will take a dip or two yourself this summer under their watery influence.

1. Waterlog by Roger Deakin. An altogether magical book, rather in the spirit of W. G. Sebald, about 'wild swimming': the author breaststrokes his way around Britain's less tame spaces and recounts his adventures in angelic prose. (See also.)

2. Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. At age fifteen, Cox set a world record swimming the English Channel. Later she swam across the Bering Strait at a time when political strain made it very doubtful whether she would obtain permission to set foot on Russian soil. An inspiring book by an exceptional athlete whose ability to tolerate very low water temperatures made possible the feat alluded to in the book's title.

3. The Science of Swimming by 'Doc' Counsilman. For the hard-core swim-obsessed only! Almost mystically redolent of mid-20th-century American sports science, Counsilman's tome includes gems like the following: "The Utopian view of an existence without any form of stress, either physical or mental, is not conducive to the development of a person well prepared for existence in a competitive society."

4. In Lane Three, Alex Archer by Tessa Duder. A wonderful young-adult novel with a strong autobiographical basis; like her protagonist Alex Archer, Tessa Duder was a talented New Zealand swimmer in the late 1950s with her eyes set on the highest goals in competitive swimming. Appealingly introduces the term 'togs' (for bathing suit) and made me grateful for the use of polyester and lycra rather than itchy sagging wool for the suits one wears in the pool nowadays.

5. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Finally, this last selection is incidentally a great novel of swimming, cycling and running, and should be adopted by triathletes everywhere as their literary inspiration.

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

TT: Almanac

"I don't think God punishes people for specific things. I think he punishes people in general, for no reason."

Christopher Durang, The Marriage of Bette and Boo

Posted by About Last Night on July 31, 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)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN LENOX, MASS:
LadiesManSCO08KSPRA_660.sized.jpg • Othello/All's Well That Ends Well/The Ladies Man (Shakespeare/Feydeau, PG-13, not suitable for children, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on July 31, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink