About Last Night: August 2008 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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

TT: Hearing is believing

Only one recording of Raymond Chandler's speaking voice survives, a BBC interview conducted with Chandler in 1958 by none other than Ian Fleming. You can listen to it by going here. If you do so, you'll be staggered to learn that the creator of Philip Marlowe sounds...well, wimpy.

I mention this fact because I've long been fascinated by recordings of the voices of famous writers and other artists, many of which I find to be personally revealing in ways that no other documentary evidence can equal. The BBC has a vast archive of recordings as rare and illuminating as the Chandler interview, but until recently it sat firmly on them. Now the British Library Sound Archive has started releasing a series of spoken-word CDs drawn from the BBC archives, the first five volumes of which are devoted to W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells.

Yep, you guessed it: I've written a "Sightings" column for tomorrow's Wall Street Journal about the great spoken-word recordings of the twentieth century, only a handful of which have made it to CD. I suspect you'll find the column frustrating, since I devote most of it to telling you about amazing things that you can't hear unless you go to a very well-stocked record library, but I think it'll interest you anyway.

If you're curious, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Charming to a fault

In this week's Wall Street Journal drama column I report from San Diego on the Old Globe's productions of The Pleasure of His Company and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Theatrical manners have changed greatly in the half century since "The Pleasure of His Company" opened on Broadway. Nowadays it's an insult to call a play "well-made," but back then you could still get away with setting a neatly crafted boulevard comedy in the drawing room of a home whose owners employed a butler. Not only did "The Pleasure of His Company" run for 474 performances, but it was later turned into a Hollywood movie that did just as well at the box office. Today, though, well-made comedies are as dead as drawing rooms, and the Old Globe's revival of "The Pleasure of His Company" is the first time that the play has been on stage anywhere since the original production closed in 1959.

To what do we attribute this act of dramatic archaeology? The credit goes to Darko Tresnjak, the Old Globe's resident artistic director, who has a taste for American stage comedies of the '50s that you wouldn't expect from a director born in Yugoslavia. "I find that underneath the glossy surfaces, the subtext [of these plays] is actually quite subversive," he told James Hebert of the San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this month. Last year Mr. Tresnjak revived John van Druten's "Bell, Book and Candle," a quintessential example of the genre. Alas, I didn't see that production, but if was half as stylish as this one, it must have been terrific....

Biddeford "Pogo" Poole (Patrick Page), the star of "The Pleasure of His Company," is an ascot-wearing socialite-sportsman who walked out on Katharine (Ellen Karas), his ex-wife, and Jessica (Erin Chambers), his only daughter, to become (in Katharine's exasperated phrase) a "globetrotting heel." Years later he shows up on Katharine's doorstep just in time for Jessica's wedding, determined to charm his way into Jessica's heart--and, if possible, Katharine's bed. That Katharine has married again, this time to a rich, dull San Francisco businessman (Jim Abele), means nothing to Pogo, who uses his charm as an offensive weapon and is in the habit of having his own way, no matter what it costs or whom it hurts.

The part of Pogo was created on Broadway by Cyril Ritchard and played on screen by Fred Astaire, which will give you a pretty good idea of what it takes to make "The Pleasure of His Company" fly. (This is the sort of play in which lines like "I dug out some of the ancestral bourbon" and "Morality is merely low blood pressure" are tossed off between drinks.) The good news is that Mr. Tresnjak and the Old Globe have got every bit of what it takes. Not only does Mr. Page waltz through his part with the utmost suppleness and urbanity, but his supporting cast keeps him all the way up on his toes...

Across the courtyard in its attractive outdoor pavilion, the Old Globe is performing "The Merry Wives of Windsor" as part of a three-play Shakespeare festival that also includes "All's Well That Ends Well" and "Romeo and Juliet." Paul Mullins has staged "Merry Wives" in the manner of a Hollywood Western, turning Falstaff (Eric Hoffmann) into a Yosemite Sam-type blowhard equipped with a pair of six-shooters and a 20-gallon hat. This isn't the first time I've seen a Shakespeare comedy transplanted to the Wild West--the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival did "As You Like It" in much the same way last season--and some of the actors, Mr. Hoffmann in particular, skate casually atop Mr. Mullins' directorial conceit instead of breaking through the ice and plunging into deeper comic waters. Still, there's plenty of uncomplicated pleasure to be found in this thoroughly agreeable production...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Almanac

"I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had."

D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix

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

TT: Scene stealing (I)

Last week I got drunk on the New Mexico landscape, at once violent and austere, colorful and stark, framed by soaring mountain ranges and a vast blue bowl of sky. It is an aesthete's delight and an artist's despair, for its beauty is so breathtaking as to defy the power of mere mortals to suggest, though countless artists have done what they could to convey its quality. Richard Diebenkorn did better than most when he painted a series of landscape-inspired abstract canvases in Albuquerque between 1950 and 1952, many of which are currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and one of which is reproduced on the cover of the Santa Fe Opera's 2008 souvenir program. (I saw it when the Phillips exhibition was on display in New York a few months ago.)

The best of these paintings do more than hint at what Willa Cather had in mind when she wrote about New Mexico in Death Comes for the Archbishop:

From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left,--piles of architecture that were like mountains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,--that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

AERIAL%20VIEW%20OF%20OPERA%20HOUSE.jpg I didn't get to see much of New Mexico when I flew out to Santa Fe two months ago to attend the press conference at which the cast and production team for the premiere of The Letter were announced. I had to race back to Manhattan the next day to cover a Broadway opening, so I ended up spending a grand total of sixteen hours in Santa Fe, more than half of them in darkness. Even then, though, I wondered whether the work that Paul Moravec and I are writing for the Santa Fe Opera would be upstaged by the countryside that surrounds the 2,128-seat outdoor theater where the company performs each summer--not to mention the theater itself, whose architectural design is a perfect complement to the 7,500-foot-high mesa atop which it sits.

Paul and I have just spent four full days and nights in Santa Fe, long enough for me to look around town in between shows and get something of a feel for the place where the Santa Fe Opera makes its home. Most of our time, though, was spent at the "ranch" at the end of Opera House Drive, where we conferred with many of the people who will be helping to put The Letter on stage next July and spent our evenings watching the company at work.

Now that I've finally seen the Santa Fe Opera perform, I feel reasonably confident that The Letter won't get lost amid the surrounding scenery--in part because the man-made scenery I saw last week was so remarkable. Robert Innes Hopkins' set for Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, most of which takes place on the main-deck and quarter-deck of H.M.S. Indomitable, is a spectacular piece of naturalistic design tinged with expressionism, and the sets for The Marriage of Figaro (by Paul Brown) and Falstaff (by Allen Moyer) are slightly less sensational but no less impressive or effective. I am, to be sure, a biased witness, but the productions as a whole seemed to me as good as any I'd seen anywhere, while Billy Budd, staged by Paul Curran, was the best Budd I've ever seen, period.

I was especially interested in Figaro because it was directed by Jonathan Kent, who will be staging The Letter, and Falstaff because the title role is currently being sung by Anthony Michaels-Moore, one of the stars of our opera. Anthony has been cast as Robert Crosbie, the cuckolded husband who was played by Herbert Marshall in William Wyler's 1940 film version of the Somerset Maugham play on which The Letter is based.

I last saw Anthony at the Metropolitan Opera House earlier this season--he was singing Balstrode in Britten's Peter Grimes--and I was amazed to discover on Tuesday that among his myriad gifts, he can be funny. Not that he'll be cracking jokes in The Letter, but comedy, as everyone knows, is harder to play than tragedy, and Anthony pulled it off with awesome aplomb. "It's the fat suit, really," he modestly told me the day after his debut. "When you put it on, something happens." Maybe, but there has to be something there in the first place, and that mysterious "something" is very much there in in Anthony's case.

As for Jonathan Kent's Figaro, it's obviously not for me to praise the work of the man who'll be directing The Letter. Instead I'll quote from my Wall Street Journal review of the 2006 Broadway revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, which I wrote many months before I knew that I would be working with Jonathan:

The original Broadway production of "Faith Healer," which starred James Mason, ran for just 20 performances. I didn't see it then and so can say nothing about its initial failure to hold the stage. Perhaps a quarter-century's worth of one-person shows has awakened New York playgoers to the theatrical power of the extended monologue. Whatever the reason, this revival is making an overwhelmingly powerful impression on the audiences who see it, as well it should.
For my part, I came away humbled by the collective mastery of the artists who are bringing "Faith Healer" to blazing life each night. Gifted as they are, though, it is Brian Friel who deserves the highest praise of all. Once again he has proved art's power to narrow the fearful gap that separates soul from soul. Like every great writer, he reveals us to one another--and to ourselves.

The preview of Faith Healer that I saw was one of the most unforgettable nights I've been privileged to spend in a theater, and when Richard Gaddes, who runs the Santa Fe Opera, asked Paul and me whether we thought Jonathan would be a suitable choice to direct The Letter, I nearly fell out of my chair.

(First of two parts)

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

TT: Almanac

"This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape."

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

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

TT: Scene stealing (II)

Richard Diebenkorn wasn't the only modern American painter to have been stirred by the New Mexico landscape. It hit Marsden Hartley just as hard. "I want to paint the livingness of appearances," Hartley said. He did just that when he came to Santa Fe in 1918, often to unforgettable effect.

I can't help but wonder what Hartley, who died in 1943, would have thought of the Santa Fe Opera's mesa-top theater, which opened its doors a decade ago. As eye-catching as it is, the Crosby Theater doesn't stand out from the surrounding countryside so much as it blends into its complex contours. The open-air theater was oriented on the mesa in such a way as to allow directors and designers to use the desert sunset as a natural backdrop to the company's productions, and the famously mercurial local weather--thunderstorms can blow up without warning--has been known to add an extra touch of drama.

SANTA%20FE%20OPERA%20%28BRIGHT%29.jpg The sensitivity with which the Crosby Theater was integrated into the Santa Fe landscape both reassured me and helped to teach me a lesson. How can the librettist and composer of a new opera, even one as action-packed as The Letter, hope to compete with thunderstorms and mountain ranges? As I watched the Santa Fe Opera perform The Marriage of Figaro, Falstaff, and Billy Budd, it occurred to me that opera is capable of "competing" on even terms with the most awe-inspiring of natural spectacles, since its subject matter--the passions of man--is no less inherently awesome.

Taking his cue from the fact that Paul Moravec and I have lately taken to calling The Letter an "opera noir," Mark Tiarks, the Santa Fe Opera's head of planning and marketing, wrote the following blurb for this year's souvenir program:

Special delivery from composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout: a hard-boiled dame cooks up her own little Singapore fling. Her double-crossing lover gets a lethal dose of lead as a lovely parting gift. Her sap of a husband helps her get away with murder. Almost...

Opera's classic ingredients--lust, adultery, and revenge--are dished up noir style in this world premiere production. The Letter will be conducted by Patrick Summers and staged by Jonathan Kent, with scenery by Hildegard Bechtler and costumes by Tom Ford. Patricia Racette stars as the venomous Leslie Crosbie, Anthony Michaels-Moore plays her husband, and James Maddalena is their ethically challenged lawyer.

That's a knowing and clever school-of-Chandler pastiche, and I was pleased to see it on the poster announcing the Santa Fe Opera's 2009 season. On the other hand, I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that The Letter is, in the oft-quoted phrase with which Joseph Kerman amusingly (and wrongly) dismissed Tosca, a "shabby little shocker." Paul and I have gone to considerable trouble to heighten the emotional climate of the play by Somerset Maugham on which our opera is based, in the process turning it from a neatly turned thriller into a full-fledged piece of lyric theater. Our characters, unlike Maugham's, are concerned not just with their own desires but with the state of their souls.

In the words of Howard Joyce, the troubled lawyer in The Letter who'll be played by Jim Maddalena:

I've lost my way in the jungle,
A way I knew when I was young,
When I thought I knew the truth.
But what is truth?
What is right?
What is love?
And where, where is the light?

None of Maugham's characters asks such questions of himself, at least not out loud. In our version of The Letter, by contrast, they are the heart of the matter, and there is nothing shabby or small about them. We are never bigger than when we grapple, however vainly, with the ultimate mysteries, of which none is more profound--or impenetrable--than the mystery of love.

HARTLEY%20VALLEY%20ROAD.jpg Would that I were a poet or a philosopher, but I'm only a critic! Still, I like to think that the powerful and ennobling music to which Paul set my simple words has made them worthy to be sung in a place like the Crosby Theater. If Maugham's play were to be performed there, by contrast, it would probably seem very small indeed, just as its cynical characters would be dwarfed by their physical surroundings. That's the difference between a well-made play and a work of lyric theater: one is about men, the other about man.

I am, of course, claiming a lot for Paul's music, but I do so unhesitatingly: I believe without reservation in his great gifts. He's not so sure. "Am I really ready to play in this league?" he asked me at the intermission of Billy Budd, and he meant it.

"You'd better believe it, pal," I replied, and I meant it, too.

Mind you, I sympathized with Paul's qualms. Not only is Budd one of the half-dozen best operas of the twentieth century, but The Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff are very possibly the two greatest operas ever written. Next summer The Letter will be sharing the stage with Don Giovanni and La Traviata, both of which are strong contenders for the same top honors. Britten, Mozart, and Verdi at their best--or even their second-best--are hard acts to follow, and only a halfwit would feel other than anxious at the thought of seeing his first opera premiered under such daunting circumstances.

Grimes%207.jpg Yet that didn't stop us from writing The Letter, nor should it have done so. Whatever else we are or aren't, Paul and I are honest craftsmen. We've done our best to make The Letter good, and we have no doubt that the Santa Fe Opera will do its best to make us look good. The company has already put together the best of all possible casts and production teams, starting with Patricia Racette, who was our first and only choice to create the role of Leslie Crosbie, the desperate anti-heroine of The Letter. I've admired Pat from afar ever since I reviewed her first Violetta at the Metropolitan Opera for the New York Daily News a decade ago. Now, much to my surprise, I'm working with her, and the experience is even more gratifying than I'd imagined it would be.

With Pat, Jim, and Anthony on stage, Jonathan at the helm, and Hildegard and Tom designing the set and costumes, I think it's fair to expect that the premiere of The Letter will be worth seeing and hearing. That's as far as I'm prepared to go--but it's far enough for me.

(Second of two parts)

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

HEARING IS BELIEVING

"What can we learn from the voices of famous writers? Sometimes they inadvertently tell us things that we suspected but never knew for sure. Hearing Raymond Chandler's mousy voice left me certain that he created the stalwart yet sensitive Marlowe as an act of wish fulfillment, allowing him to 'do' on paper what he would never have dared do in real life..."

Posted by About Last Night on August 5, 2008 5:58 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"All truth is profound."

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

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

TT: Snapshot

Orson Welles reads the opening section of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick:

(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 August 6, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.

Robinson Jeffers, "Boats in a Fog"

Posted by About Last Night on August 7, 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:
• 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 NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:
• The Pleasure of His Company (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

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

TT: Almanac

"On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person."

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

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

TT: Six Flags over Woodstock

Today's entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to a review of the New York revival of Hair. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

The gray-ponytail set is turning out in force to see the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park revival of "Hair," the peace-love-and-dope musical that transferred to Broadway 40 years ago, ran for 1,750 performances and sent convulsions through the theatrical establishment whose ripples can be felt to this day. "Hair" was one of the first shows to feature a rock score, and though it didn't win the best-musical Tony--the top honors that year went to "1776," a world-class irony--Galt MacDermot's music was the thin end of the wedge that ultimately opened up Broadway to the music of the baby boomers and their children. Small wonder that this production, the first major New York revival of "Hair" since 1977, should be causing such a fuss in the Year of Obamamania. If you were a 20-year-old hippie in 1968, it must be quite a thrill to watch a bunch of pretty kids onstage in Central Park celebrating yourself when young....

So how does "Hair" look 40 years on? Pretty thin, alas, though the damn-the-torpedoes staging and choreography of Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage and the impassioned singing and dancing of the cast (Caren Lyn Manuel and Patina Renea Miller are especially good) succeed in making it seem marginally fresher than it really is. Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater's artistic director, has written yet another of his eye-rollingly fatuous program notes, this one assuring us that "Hair" was "a contemporary play influenced by the sweep and scale of Shakespearean dramaturgy." The truth is that "Hair" was and is a poorly crafted revue whose second act disintegrates before your eyes. James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who collaborated on the book and lyrics, didn't know the first thing about how to write a musical, and their idea of scintillating wit was to rhyme "pederasty" with "Why do these words sound so nasty?"

Even Mr. MacDermot's music, the show's only remaining claim to distinction, is no better than catchy. Lest we forget, 1968 was the year of "Beggar's Banquet," "Crown of Creation," "Electric Ladyland," "Music from Big Pink," "Wheels of Fire," and any number of other now-classic rock albums that make "Hair" sound like a medley of AM-radio jingles....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Almanac

"The stars are the apexes of what triangles!"

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (Oct. 5, 1847)

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

TT: Two, six, heave!

On Thursday Mrs. T and I drove from Connecticut to Camden, Maine, and spent the weekend on a windjammer. Schooner Grace Bailey is a 123-foot-long cargo ship that once sailed the high seas and now carries tourists on trips to nowhere in particular. It was declared a national historic landmark in 1992, at which time the following "statement of significance" was issued by the National Park Service:

A coasting schooner, GRACE BAILEY was constructed in 1882 to carry lumber from southern ports to Patchogue, Maine. In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, two-masted coasting schooners were the most common American vessel, carrying freight along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts, and on the Great Lakes. In 1939, she became part of the fleet of windjammers created by Frank Swift; for most of the time since then, she has seen continuous service as a "dude boat."

What possessed a landlubber like me to set sail on such a vessel? Cherchez la femme. My wife confessed to me some months ago that she had long dreamed of going on a windjammer cruise, so I decided to make her dream come true. Like her, I'm a passionate fan of Patrick O'Brian's sea stories, but that was the whole of my paltry stock of marine-related knowledge, so I started Googling, and a few minutes later I arrived at the Web site of the Grace Bailey. I liked the look of the boat and the sound of the owners, and one of the summer cruises fit more or less neatly into my playgoing schedule. I took a deep breath and booked a cabin for two.

The result of my feckless gamble was a blissful weekend--though it didn't start out that way. The rain in Maine falls mainly when you want to be out of doors, and it was descending with a vengeance as Mrs. T and I showed up at Camden Harbor with bags in hand and sickly smiles on our faces. One of the hands showed us to our cabin, which was small, dark, and severe. We exchanged a furtive look that said What have we gotten ourselves into? By then, though, it was too late to back out, so we resolved to make the best of it.

I won't try to tell you that things started looking up as soon as we cast off--it was already pretty damned cold and soon got worse--but J.R., the captain of the Grace Bailey, did manage to get us in the mood, first by introducing his fifteen soggy passengers to one another and then by pressing us into service as unskilled hands. In my case "unskilled" is putting it mildly, but even I can clap onto a line and pull, and I was already feeling hopeful again by the time the mainsail was hoisted. "Every time I say 'Two, six,' you pull on the rope and yell 'Heave!'" said Kristi, the first mate. It was all I could do to keep from replying, "I remember that from The Thirteen-Gun Salute!" Instead I shut up and heaved, and before long the sails were aloft and we were underway.

Hard experience has taught the captain and crew of the Grace Bailey how to gird the loins of their customers against inclement weather. Instead of letting us sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, they filled us full of lobster, steak, corn on the cob, and Caesar salad, all of it perfectly prepared and incredibly tasty. Mrs. T and I both admitted to feeling halfway optimistic by the time we staggered down the hatch to our bunks.

The sun came out before breakfast, and from then on we were home free. We spent the whole of Saturday talking, eating, napping, sunning ourselves on the deck, and sailing around Penobscot Bay. By lunchtime we'd gotten to know most of our fellow passengers, all of whom proved to be excellent companions, and once J.R. brought out a guitar and started picking away at "I Am a Pilgrim," the atmosphere on deck grew as warm as the cast-iron wood stove in the galley below.

Part of what makes the Grace Bailey so tight a ship is the sheer niceness of its crew, most of whom are as interested in the arts as they are in sailing. No sooner did I mention to Alison, the cook, that I was a drama critic than she started quizzing me about what Shakespeare & Company was up to this season. As for Kristi, she's a triple threat--musical-comedy actress, modern dancer, and yoga instructor. (She was featured on the cover of a recent issue of Yoga + Joyful Living.) I offered to accompany her on the battered upright piano in the saloon, and we managed to get through "If I Were a Bell," which she sang gorgeously and I played...well, acceptably. Mrs. T put in a couple of hours chopping garlic in the galley (she likes to help out in the kitchen) and hung out with Santiago and Bowen, the second and third mates, whom she later described to me as "hot."

The bay was shrouded in fog on Sunday morning, so J.R. brought us into Camden Harbor inch by cautious inch. The town emerged abruptly from the mist, and a few minutes later Mrs. T and I were standing on the dock once more, exchanging hugs and e-mail addresses with our new friends. Then we drove down Highway 1 to Portland, ate a fancy dinner at Five Fifty-Five, and checked into the Pomegranate Inn, an elegant bed-and-breakfast that doubles as an art gallery. Our second-floor room was bright, airy, had a private bath, and was eight times the size of our cabin on the Grace Bailey.

%2839%29%20WELLIVER%20NIGHT%20SCENE.jpg We were, needless to say, more than happy to sleep at the Pomegranate Inn, for Mrs. T and I are both spoiled city dwellers who like our creature comforts too well to venture very far from the beaten path. Still, I expect it will be a long time before either one of us forgets what it feels like to stand on the quarter-deck of a two-masted schooner and look up at the Big Dipper, smelling the sharp salt air and marveling at the commonplace magic of a cool, clear August night spent on the moonlit waters of Maine.

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

TT: Almanac

"It is always the prosaic person who demands poetic subjects."

G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson

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

TT: Down Texas way

3-Pueblo-Mountain%2C-NM_s.jpg Should you happen to be anywhere near the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth this month, I strongly suggest that you pay a visit to Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism, a show consisting of forty-odd canvases painted by Hartley in New Mexico between 1918 and 1924. I made enthusiastic mention of Hartley's little-known New Mexico paintings when I blogged last week about my recent visit to Santa Fe, and one of the images I posted was a reproduction of Valley Road, which belongs to the Cincinnati Art Museum but is currently part of the Amon Carter show.

I wish I could say that I'll see you there, but I'm otherwise occupied in another part of the country! The show is up through August 24, so if any of you are lucky enough to see it between now and then, be sure to write and tell me what I'm missing.

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

TT: Nel mezzo del cammin

Mrs. T and I are working our way from Maine to New Hampshire to Massachusetts, then back to Maine. We spent Sunday night in Portland, where we stayed at the Pomegranate Inn, a bed-and-breakfast that is also a gallery. Having spent the preceding weekend on a two-masted schooner whose quarters are close, we were glad to be able to spread out and relax. The innkeeper left an attractive assortment of books in our room, including William Faulkner's The Hamlet, Graham Greene's The Lost Childhood, John Marquand's So Little Time, and a folio of Adolph Gottlieb's pictographs, and we ate our breakfast crêpes beneath an acrylic abstract by a Maine painter named Honour Mack. Pretty arty, huh?

ZIMMERMAN%20HOUSE%20%28OUTSIDE%29.jpg From Portland we drove to Manchester, where we spent the day visiting the Currier Museum of Art and Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman House, which was built in 1950 and is now owned by the museum. The Currier's small but choice permanent collection includes a dozen noteworthy paintings by Arthur Dove, Adolph Gottlieb, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Charles Sheeler, Andrew Wyeth, and Neil Welliver, all of which are on display and very much worth seeing. The crowning glory of the museum, however, is the Zimmerman House, a flawlessly executed specimen of Wright's Usonian style that was bequeathed to the Currier by its original owners, whose ashes were scattered in the backyard garden. One of the docents who showed us around the house grew up in the neighborhood--she still lives there--and told us that the local children referred to their ultra-modern home as "the monkey house" when it was under construction.

MUSIC%20STAND.jpg Not only is the house in near-mint condition, but it contains all of the original furniture that Wright designed for the Zimmermans, including a custom-crafted four-rack music stand. Isadore Zimmerman and his wife Lucille were both serious amateur musicians who hosted concerts in their living room, and Wright's stand permits the members of a string quartet to play facing one another. Of the twelve Wright houses that I've stayed in or toured, this is the one that I find most aesthetically perfect, though the Seth Peterson Cottage runs it a close second (Mrs. T prefers the Muirhead Farmhouse).

KALIL%20HOUSE.jpg As if all that weren't exciting enough for one day, it so happens that yet another Wright house is located only a few blocks away from the Zimmerman House. The Kalil House remains in private hands but is easily visible from the street, and if you should happen to have $1,900,000 to spare, you can buy it. (Go here to see listings for the seventeen other Wright houses that are currently on the market.) Alas, Mrs. T and I forgot to bring our checkbook, so we settled for looking longingly out the windows of the tour bus that drove us from the Currier to the Zimmerman House and back again.

I'm playing semi-hooky from my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, by which I mean that I haven't been to any shows since last Tuesday, when I saw Hair in Central Park. This morning, though, I'll be writing a column about Shakespeare Santa Cruz (which we visited last weekend) and the Irish Repertory Theatre's production of Around the World in 80 Days (which I saw a couple of weeks ago) in Room 3 of the Bedford Village Inn. As soon as it's finished, Mrs. T and I will eat breakfast, pack our bags, hop in the car, and pay a visit to Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, who's been holed up at the MacDowell Colony for the past few weeks. Then we'll go see the Peterborough Players do Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which was written in (and about) Peterborough, New Hampshire.

From there we head south...but that's enough for today. Breakfast awaits!

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

TT: Almanac

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

John Berryman, "Dream Song 14"

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

TT: Snapshot

John McCormack sings "I Hear You Calling Me" in 1929, accompanied by Edwin Schneider:

(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 August 13, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I am omnbibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all. I learned early in life how to handle alcohol and never had any trouble with it. The rules are simple as mud. First, never drink if you have any work to do. Never. Secondly, never drink alone. That's the way to become a drunkard. Thirdly, even if you haven't got any work to do, never drink while the sun is shining. Wait until it's dark."

H.L. Mencken, interview (recorded by the Library of Congress in 1948)

Posted by About Last Night on August 14, 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:
• 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 SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"If my discoveries are other people's commonplaces I cannot help it--for me they retain a momentous freshness."

Elizabeth Bowen

Posted by About Last Night on August 14, 2008 12:24 AM | Permalink

TT: Parker's back

A few months ago I announced in this space that the University of Chicago Press would be bringing out a uniform edition of the Parker crime novels of "Richard Stark," the nom de plume of Donald E. Westlake. Interested parties will be pleased to know that the first three titles in the series, The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit, have just been published. (I reviewed them here.)

For more information about the Parker Edition, visit the blog of the University of Chicago Press, where you will also find a link to a very interesting interview with Donald Westlake:

When Bucklin Moon of Pocket Books said he wanted to publish The Hunter, if I'd help Parker escape the law at the end so I could write more books about him, I was at first very surprised. He was the bad guy in the book.
More than that, I'd done nothing to make him easy for the reader; no smalltalk, no quirks, no pets. I told myself the only way I could do it is if I held onto what Buck seemed to like, the very fact that he was a compendium of what your lead character should not be. I must never soften him, never make him user-friendly, and I've tried to hold to that.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 14, 2008 10:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."

William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

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

TT: Sousa the storyteller

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I ran into the tuba-playing son of a member of the Sousa Band on one of my recent theater-related journeys. He loaned me a copy of Marching Along, John Philip Sousa's long-out-of-print 1928 autobiography, which I read and found (somewhat to my surprise) to be utterly fascinating.

I resolved at once to write a "Sightings" column about Sousa and his memoirs, and the fruits of that resolution will be published in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. It turns out that Sousa, who also wrote three full-length novels and 138 newspaper and magazine articles, was as vigorous and engaging a prose stylist as he was a composer, and Marching Along offers a vivid glimpse of his offstage personality.

To find out more about Sousa and Marching Along, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Greasepaint under the redwoods

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review three shows, Burn This, All's Well That Ends Well, and Bach in Leipzig, currently being performed at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, plus an off-Broadway show, the Irish Repertory Theatre's production of Around the World in 80 Days. I liked them all. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Outdoor theater festivals are like picnics--the food tastes better when eaten al fresco, but sometimes it rains. Shakespeare Santa Cruz, founded in 1981, splits the difference by performing in two different theaters, one outside and the other inside, both of them deep within the woodsy campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Each summer the company presents two Shakespeare plays in a natural amphitheatre located in a redwood grove and two modern plays in a nearby 527-seat indoor theater equipped with stadium seating and a thrust stage. I've been hearing exciting things about the festival, so I flew out to California last weekend and caught three shows there, all of which were worthy of their sylvan setting.

BURN%20THIS.jpg Lanford Wilson's "Burn This," to be sure, no longer looks quite so fresh as it did in the long-ago days when the wisecracking gay second-banana character had yet to become a cliché. Twenty-one years after it transferred to Broadway, "Burn This" can now be seen for what it is, a sentimental variation on "A Streetcar Named Desire" in which the crazy girl is a workaholic choreographer who lives in a converted loft and longs to get a life, the tough-guy stud is a closet aesthete and everybody lives happily ever after. No wonder it ran for 437 performances!

On the other hand, Mr. Wilson is a playwright of quality, and if "Burn This" has a core of mush, it's also well made, well written, very funny when it wants to be and an effective vehicle for four interesting actors and a director who knows how to shift them into overdrive. Shakespeare Santa Cruz delivers the goods...

If you long for theatrical froth whipped up with insolent panache, you'll have a hard time finding a more satisfying show than the Irish Repertory Theatre's production of "Around the World in 80 Days," Mark Brown's stage version of Jules Verne's 1873 novel about a stiff-upper-lipped Londoner who uproots himself from the Reform Club to go charging around the globe. Co-produced with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the company that brought you John Doyle's miniaturized revival of "Company," "Around the World in 80 Days" is performed on a very, very small stage on which Phileas Fogg (Daniel Stewart) and his trusty servant Passepartout (Evan Zes) circumnavigate the world via steamship, express train and chartered elephant. The cast consists of five actors and two "Foley artists" who supply sound effects and incidental music in full view of the audience....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

GALLERY

Diebenkorn in New Mexico (Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, Washington, D.C., up through Sunday). If you haven't yet seen this important show of abstract paintings and works on paper, don't delay--it closes this weekend. Richard Diebenkorn created these works when he lived in Albuquerque from 1950 to 1952, and the best of them suggest with uncanny exactitude the austere yet wrenchingly vivid New Mexico landscape (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2008 7:35 AM | Permalink

SOUSA THE STORYTELLER

"Now that I've read John Philip Sousa's autobiography, I'm surprised that it isn't better known to historians of American music. Like Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Notes of a Pianist before it, Marching Along provides a priceless glimpse of the lost world of music making in Victorian America..."

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2008 11:53 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

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

TT: Sacred to the memory

WILLA%20CATHER%27S%20GRAVE.jpg Mrs. T and I spent last Tuesday and Wednesday in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where we visited the grave of Willa Cather, whom I wrote about in the Teachout Reader and who has been much on my mind lately. Cather was a frequent visitor to Jaffrey--she wrote most of My Ántonia there--and in 1947 she was laid to rest in the Old Burying Ground, a cemetery located in back of the Meeting House, a steeple-topped church-like building that was raised by the citizens of Jaffrey in 1775.

I'm not in the habit of going to the gravesites of famous people, though I did make a point of seeking out H.L. Mencken's grave when I was writing his biography and, a few years later, stopped by the resting place of Justice Holmes during a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. (I haven't yet gone to the cemetery in Flushing where Louis Armstrong is buried, but I plan to do so as soon as I get back to New York in September.) This particular pilgrimage, however, seemed right, for the Old Burying Ground is just up the road from the 150-year-old inn where Mrs. T and I were staying, and it also happened that we were in town to see a production of a play whose last act is set in a New Hampshire cemetery.

The Old Burying Ground is shady, quiet, and full of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tombstones, some worn almost smooth and others as legible as on the day they were carved. A fair number of Revolutionary War veterans are buried there, and their graves are marked with small flags. It's not a spot that ordinary tourists seek out, nor does Cather's grave appear to draw many visitors. Her headstone, which is at the southeastern corner of the cemetery, is moderately large, elegantly carved, and bears an inscription from My Ántonia: "...that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." Immediately to the right of the stone, which is ringed by bright-colored impatiens, is a small, almost self-consciously discreet plaque that marks the grave of Edith Lewis, Cather's companion, who outlived her by a quarter-century.

A few hours after departing the Old Burying Ground, Mrs. T and I drove to nearby Peterborough to see the Peterborough Players perform Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play that Cather admired greatly. Not long after seeing it on Broadway in 1938, she sent Wilder a letter telling him that Our Town was "the loveliest thing that has been produced in this country in a long, long time--and the truest." Two years later the Peterborough Players became the first summer theater company ever to perform Our Town, and Wilder himself supervised the staging. He had written much of the play at the MacDowell Colony, which is only a couple of miles away from the converted barn where the Peterborough Players perform, and it is generally thought that he used the small town of Peterborough (pop. 5,883) as a model for Grover's Corners, the imaginary hamlet (pop. 2,642) in which Our Town is set.

The role of the Stage Manager is being played this summer by James Whitmore, who is eighty-six years old. His age adds a deeper resonance to the lines he speaks at the beginning of the graveyard scene:

You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth...and the ambitions they had...and the pleasures they had...and the things they suffered...and the people they loved.
They get weaned away from earth--that's the way I put it,--weaned away.

As I listened to Whitmore last Wednesday night, I remembered the Old Burying Ground, and the shyly modest plaque tucked alongside the handsome gravestone inscribed with a line from a ninety-year-old novel that continues to be read. What will survive of us is love, I thought, recalling the poem by Philip Larkin that last came to my mind when, two and a half years ago, I turned on a car radio and heard by chance the recorded voice of a friend who had died a decade earlier.

The next morning Mrs. T and I paid a visit to Peterborough's East Hill Cemetery, an out-of-the-way spot that many well-informed locals believe to be the original of the unnamed cemetery in Our Town, though Wilder himself never admitted as much. So far as I could tell, no one has been buried there since 1932, but the Petersborough Historical Society continues to maintain the grounds and looks after the increasingly fragile headstones. East Hill is steep and there's nowhere to park, so we left our rented car by the side of the road and started climbing. Within a minute or two we felt as though we'd stepped through a curtain into a lost world, one that Wilder's Stage Manager describes with haunting precision:

This is certainly an important part of Grover's Corners. It's on a hilltop--a windy hilltop--lots of sky, lots of clouds,--often lots of sun and moon and stars....
Yes, beautiful spot up here. Mountain laurel and li-lacks. I often wonder why people like to be buried in Woodlawn and Brooklyn when they might pass the same time up here in New Hampshire.

Over there--

Pointing to stage left

are the old stones,--1670, 1680. Strong-minded people that come a long way to be independent. Summer people walk around there laughing at the funny words on the tombstones...it don't do any harm. And genealogists come up from Boston--get paid by city people for looking up their ancestors. They want to make sure they're Daughters of the American Revolution and of the Mayflower...Well, I guess that don't do any harm, either. Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense....

Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.

People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill. We all know how it is...and then time...and sunny days...and rainy days...'n snow...We're all glad they're in a beautiful place and we're coming up here ourselves when our fit's over.

Those words echoed in my mind's ear as we walked around the cemetery, pausing from time to time to read the wholly unfunny words on the oddly tilted stones. Prepare for Death and follow me: that's the last line of a half-legible quatrain carved at the base of the tombstone of Samuel Stanton, who died in 1771 and now reposes on East Hill, surrounded by his family. Might Wilder have had him in mind when he gave a name to Simon Stimson, the drunken, unhappy choirmaster of Our Town?

WILDER%20AS%20STAGE%20MANAGER.jpg Mrs. T and I didn't have much to say as we made our way back down the hill. A light summer shower was falling, just as it does in the last act of Our Town, and we were each lost in our separate thoughts. Once more I recalled the words of the Stage Manager, a role that Thornton Wilder played on several occasions, both in summer-stock productions and on Broadway for two weeks in September of 1938:

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk...or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.
He winds his watch.

Hm....Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners.--You get a good rest, too. Good night.

For those of us still on earth, straining to make something of ourselves, it seems there is no weaning away from the people we love and lose: they are always there, dissolved into the completeness of eternity, waiting patiently--and, I suspect, indifferently--for the little resurrection that is memory.

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

TT: Almanac

"Bernard's humanism was not the less violently held because he had lately begun to doubt whether it was a totally adequate answer."

Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After

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

TT: Shakespeare on the tube

Mark your calendar: PBS will be telecasting the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's production of Twelfth Night, together with a backstage documentary called Shakespeare on the Hudson that (according to the press release) "gives viewers an intimate look at the backstory and theatrical process of preparing for and performing Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to a sell-out crowd. Shakespeare on the Hudson follows the troupe's core actors through all the real off-stage drama as they prepare for opening night, from the high-pressure auditions and call backs to the final moments backstage before the performance begins."

I raved about Hudson Valley's Twelfth Night in The Wall Street Journal when it opened last month:

The company's productions are models of uncondescending theatrical populism, reaching out to contemporary audiences without watering down Shakespeare beyond recognition. In John Christian Plummer's staging of "Twelfth Night," for instance, the actors all wear dresses of riotously varied kinds, not in order to make a ham-fisted statement about gender politics but to create an atmosphere in which Viola (played by Katie Hartke, who is adorably earnest) can impersonate a handsome boy without stretching credulity until it snaps. While Mr. Plummer and his youthful cast never let you forget that "Twelfth Night" is drop-dead funny--Paul Bates, Richard Ercole, Maia Guest and Wesley Mann are superb clowns all--they are just as careful to give full value to the fresh-faced ardor of Shakespeare's lovers.

In New York City, Shakespeare on the Hudson and Twelfth Night will air back to back on WNET on September 18 at eight p.m. and on WLIW on September 26 at nine p.m. I don't know whether or when the two shows will be telecast nationally, so check your local listings--this one is a must.

To watch a video of scenes from Hudson Valley's Twelfth Night, go here.

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

TT: Almanac

"All men mean well."

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, "The Revolutionist's Handbook"

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

TT: Snapshot

George Bernard Shaw, filmed in 1928:

(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 August 20, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what the fishermen did in the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a-visiting, sit about, and tell stories, though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a long vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been there in winter to hear their yarns."

Henry David Thoreau, "Cape Cod"

Posted by About Last Night on August 21, 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:
• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS:
• 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)

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

CLOSING SOON IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:
• All's Well That Ends Well/Bach in Leipzig/Burn This (Shakespeare/Moses/Wilson, PG-13, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

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

TT: Done and done

51WEHNTsYcL._SL500_AA240_.jpg Mrs. T and I finally made it home to Connecticut on Monday, and I wish I could say that we'd been taking it easy ever since. No such luck: I've written a Wall Street Journal drama column, spent a grueling ten-hour day editing the manuscript of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and am now gearing up to knock out a Commentary essay on David Thomson's new book, which will be published next month. Our recent travels to California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Vermont barely seem real by now, though it's not as though they never happened--I just can't remember them very well, except for the steamed hot dogs we ate at Flo's on Sunday and some of the shows we saw along the way.

No doubt a few more nights' sleep will help us both unwind a bit, though by then we'll be packing our bags for yet another trip, this one to Wisconsin to see American Players Theatre and visit Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's country estate. We leave next Monday and get back next Thursday, and after that we'll be off the road for three straight weeks.

%2850%29%20AT%20HOME%20WITH%20LUCILLE.jpg Looking back on the near-nonstop events of the past month, I realize that even for me, this has been coming it a bit high. As for my poor spouse, I suspect she's feeling a bit like Lucille Armstrong, Louis' fourth wife, who got the shock of her life when she married a working musician and discovered what it meant to go on the road.

As I wrote in Rhythm Man:

Popular renown had brought few changes in Louis Armstrong's daily life. He had always been a workhorse, and Joe Glaser, his manager, worked him harder than ever now that he was starting to make serious money. "Once we jumped from Bangor, Maine, to New Orleans for a one-nighter, then on to Houston, Texas, for the next night," Pops Foster, the Armstrong band's bassist, recalled in his autobiography.
Armstrong lived in the continuous present, playing pretty for the people, grabbing a bite to eat between shows, signing autographs after the last set, typing a stack of fan letters before bedtime, then starting from scratch the next day. After each dance he peeled off his sweat-soaked clothes and cleaned himself as best he could. "I mean, you see, places did not have them fine dressing rooms and showers and things then," said Charlie Holmes, who spent five years in his saxophone section. "You just waited until everybody got out of the place, and then he could change his clothes after everybody had gone, and dry himself with his own towels and things." The going wasn't always that tough--sometimes the band traveled by private railroad car--but most of the time Armstrong's men rode the bus, and he rode it with them. "He was a hard worker and a hard-workin' man," Holmes added, "and he didn't ask you to do nothin' that he wouldn't do."

Lucille had no inkling of what it would be like to live out of a suitcase. "My honeymoon was eight months of one-nighters and I thought I was going to give up the whole marriage," she said later. "I'd never been away from home and I just couldn't take it." But she did what she could to make the anonymous hotel rooms in which they lived more inviting, and that Christmas Eve she bought a small tree, set it up in their room, and trimmed it, not knowing that her new husband, who had spent his childhood rummaging through garbage cans for food to sell, had never had a Christmas tree of his own.

He came back to the room that night and was stunned by the brightly colored lights. "We finally went to bed," Lucille remembered. "And Louis was still laying up in the bed watching the tree, his eyes just like a baby's eyes would watch something....So finally I asked him--I said, 'Well, I'll turn the lights out now on the tree.' He said, 'No, don't turn them out. I have to just keep looking at it.'" They carted the tree from hotel to hotel until it dried up and had to be thrown out.

Needless to say, it wasn't quite like that for us. Last week, for instance, we spent two perfectly happy nights in the attic suite of the Benjamin Prescott Inn, a 150-year-old farmhouse that is one of our favorite New England homes-away-from-home. The neighborhood is peaceful, the breakfasts delicious, the innkeepers unobtrusively friendly, the nearby restaurants excellent. Not all of our lodgings were that agreeable, but none was less than satisfactory, and all the things we saw and did along the way were worth the time spent getting from point A to point Z.

Even so, enough is enough, and that's what Mrs. T and I have had. Throughout the last few days of our trip, we longed to come back home to our farmhouse, watch old movies on TV, eat leftovers, look at the deer on the lawn, do the laundry, and sleep late. I haven't had much luck with the latter, but all the other items on that homely agenda have been checked off at least once since Monday afternoon.

You will note, by the way, that blogging is nowhere to be found on the above list. I really do need a few days off, so I'm going to take them, unless I don't. I can't speak for my colleagues, but I chatted with Our Girl on the phone last night, so I know she's alive, and CAAF is actually reported to have blown through New York while Mrs. T and I were on the road. Perhaps one or both of them will take up the slack, but if they don't, there'll always be a daily almanac quote!

Now, if you'll excuse me, the next item on my schedule is a nap....

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

TT: Almanac

"I should have thought that even your cheap magazine mentality would have learnt by now that it is seldom with people's characters that one falls in love."

Noël Coward, A Song at Twilight

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

TT: Brave Coward

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on some (but not all!) of the shows I saw on my recent travels from hither to yon. This week I review the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Noël Coward in Two Keys, the Peterborough Players' Our Town, and the Williamstown Theater Festival's Home. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

TwoKeysBTF08KSPRA_218.sized.jpg Noël Coward wrote a handful of serious plays, but hardly anybody does them anymore, and his reputation now rests exclusively on the divine frivolity of his ever-popular lighter-than-air comedies of bad manners. So naturally I couldn't resist when the Berkshire Theatre Festival announced that it would be reviving "Noël Coward in Two Keys," a double bill of one-act plays that includes "A Song of Twilight," in which The Master (as his friends called him) shook off the caution of a lifetime and wrote with utter sincerity about the still-hot topic of homosexuality, a subject that he had previously handled with the longest of tongs. Coward, of course, was a gay man who grew up at a time when the British authorities threw gay men in jail for pursuing their sexual interests, which suffices to explain his protracted discretion. What is more surprising is that at the very end of his life he summoned up the nerve to write such a play--as well as the artfulness to make it one of his very best....

Thornton Wilder wrote most of "Our Town" at the MacDowell Colony, and it's widely thought that he was inspired by the New Hampshire village in which America's oldest artists' colony is located. The townspeople have no doubt of it: "Welcome to Our Town" is emblazoned on Peterborough's city-limits signs. As for the Peterborough Players, their relationship with the play goes all the way back to 1940, when Wilder supervised their first staging of "Our Town." Now the company is celebrating its 75th anniversary by remounting Gus Kaikkonen's 2000 production of Wilder's beloved study of small-town life, and has invited James Whitmore back to reprise his performance as the Stage Manager. The Peterborough Players couldn't have given themselves a better birthday present. This "Our Town" is perfectly, unassumingly right, a model of how to freshen a classic not by adding gimmicky touches of directorial frou-frou but simply by performing it the way it was written, adding only the enlivening force that makes an old chestnut seem brand new....

David Storey made a modest name for himself in this country four decades ago with "Home," doubtless in large part because John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson came over from London to star in it. Since then, though, only one of Mr. Storey's other plays has been seen on Broadway, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival's revival of "Home" suggests the reason why: Mr. Storey is the kind of British playwright whose work doesn't travel....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

CD

Louis Armstrong, Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann's Yeast Show & Louis' Home-Recorded Tapes (Jazz Society, two CDs). Don't be thrown by the elephantine title--this is the most important historical release of the decade. The first CD consists of previously unreleased 1937 airchecks from NBC's Harlem Radio Review, the first variety series ever to be hosted by a black, in which Louis Armstrong and the Luis Russell band play as though the world were ending. The band never sounded remotely as hot as this on its commercial sides for Decca, and Armstrong is in full-tilt knock-'em-dead mode. The second CD consists of fascinating snippets from Armstrong's private stash of postwar reel-to-reel after-hours recordings, the same tapes on which I drew in writing Rhythm Man. Absolutely not to be missed under any circumstances whatsoever (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 22, 2008 5:37 PM | Permalink

BOOK

David Thomson, "Have You Seen...?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf, $39.95). A companion volume to The New Biographical Dictionary of Film in which my favorite film critic holds forth on a thousand variously significant movies--some great, some good, some awful--all discussed in quirky single-page essays that are models of pithy, quotable idiosyncrasy. Have You Seen...? will be the book of the season for smart filmgoers who love a good argument (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 22, 2008 5:47 PM | Permalink

TT: It's official

My editor at Harcourt just told me that Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be published in the fall of 2009.

Watch this space for further details.

If you feel like celebrating with me, do it by watching this video:

Posted by About Last Night on August 22, 2008 7:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To account for Cather's fiction by reading it as an encoding of covert, even guilty, sexuality, is, I think, patronizing and narrow. It assumes that the work is written only in order to express homosexual feeling in disguise; it makes her out to be a coward (which was certainly not one of her failings); and it assumes that 'openness' would have been preferable. If the argument is that 'Cather never dealt adequately with her homosexuality in her fiction,' that My Ántonia is 'a betrayal of female independence and female sexuality,' and that The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop retreat into 'a world dominated by patriarchy,' then Cather is diminished by being enlisted to a cause. She was a writer who worked, at her best, through indirection, suppression, and suggestion, and through a refusal to be enlisted."

Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives

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

TT: Fingerprints

One of the advantages of writing a book on a word processor is that you can search the manuscript for repeated words and phrases. This can be, to say the least, a chastening experience. Like all prolific authors, I have my mannerisms, and over the weekend I did my best to vacuum as many of them as possible out of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

Here's a list of the words and phrases for which I searched. I invite you to speculate on what they say about me:

amaze
astonish
at the end of his life
celebrity
countless
delight/delighted
doubtless/no doubt
engaging
extraordinary
extravagant
frank
generation
generous/generosity
glee
grand total
handsome
impress
interesting
just as
late in life
made the most
mere
more and more
needless to say
no less
nor
nostalgic/nostalgia
noteworthy
occasional
on the other hand
panache
pivot
presumably
quaint
quite
relish
remarkable
revealing
self-evident
stagger/staggering
stiff
striking
stun/stunned
surprising
transform
vivid
wanted to hear
whatever
wonder

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

TT: Stuff gray people like

Stuff White People Like took on Facebook the other day:

Social Networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example under music they would simply list "P.M. Dawn" or under films they would choose only Armageddon. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.

I have a Facebook page, believe it or not, but I don't do Irony Lite, nor do I care whether other people find my tastes insufficiently cool, much less insufficiently "white" (by which Stuff White People Like, needless to say, means something very different from that which was meant when I was growing up in southeast Missouri half a lifetime ago).

As it happens, I tried to take Stuff White People Like's Facebook test yesterday, but gave it up after running into three consecutive questions for which my answer was None of the above, which was not an option. My impression, however, was that I'm not very "white," a fact which amuses me, albeit only mildly. Speaking as an arty Upper West Side drama critic who works for The Wall Street Journal, likes both sushi and hot dogs, is currently writing an opera, and can sit down at the piano and play Nat Cole's "Easy Listening Blues" on request, I'm not at all sure what color I am.

In the interests of chromatic clarification, here is the personal information that appeared on my Facebook page last week:

• Activities. Reading, writing, playgoing, traveling, collecting prints, consuming art of all kinds. Recently finished writing Rhythm Man, a biography of Louis Armstrong, and the libretto for The Letter, an operatic version of the play by Somerset Maugham (music by Paul Moravec). Last piece written: Saturday's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column on John Philip Sousa.

• Interests. Art, art, and more art.

• Favorite music. Last CD acquired: Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Showtime at the Spotlite: 52nd Street, New York City, June 1946. Last song played: Memphis Slim, "Mother Earth."

• Favorite TV shows. Don't watch any (sigh).

• Favorite movies. Ever: Rules of the Game. Most recently seen: Out of the Past. Last show seen: My Fair Lady at the Ogunquit Playhouse (with Jefferson Mays as Henry Higgins).

• Favorite book. Novel: The Great Gatsby. Biography: W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. Currently re-reading: Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After.

• Favorite quotes. "If there's no alternative, there's no problem" (James Burnham). "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind" (Louis Pasteur). "I don't think God punishes people for specific things. I think he punishes people in general, for no reason" (Christopher Durang).

What does all this make me? Gray, I guess.

By the way, I invite those of you who only just started reading this blog to compute your Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. It is, if I do say so myself, a much more sophisticated taste-measuring instrument than the Stuff White People Like Facebook Test--and vastly more serious to boot.

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

TT: Credo

John Russell, who wrote for the New York Times for many years, died on Saturday. His Times obituary included the following quote from Reading Russell, a collection of his critical essays:

I do not see my role as primarily punitive. There are artists whose work I dread to see yet again, dance-dramas that in my view have set back the American psyche several hundred years, composers whose names drive me from the concert hall, authors whose books I shall never willingly reopen. But it has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing.

I very much wish I'd said that. It's exactly how I feel about what I do, and now that I've seen it put so lucidly, I mean to try even harder to live up to it.

Posted by About Last Night on August 25, 2008 7:17 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God."

Herman Melville, Pierre

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

TT: As it happened

If you read last week's posting about my recent visit to the New Hampshire graveyard that is thought to have inspired the final scene of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, you may be interested in seeing this photograph of the original 1938 Broadway production. The man with the pipe is Frank Craven, who created the role of the Stage Manager and is about to deliver his closing monologue.

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

TT: Up front

I've settled on the epigraphs for Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

The first one comes from a letter written by Armstrong shortly before his death in 1971:

Now I must tell you that my whole life has been happiness.

The second one is a remark made by the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi:

Don't look for obscure formulas, nor for le mystère. It is pure joy I'm giving you.

The Brancusi quote exists in numerous variants, and I went to a good deal of trouble to track it to what appears to be its original source.

The Armstrong quote was originally published in Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971, a book by Max Jones and John Chilton, and is well known to Armstrong scholars.

Here it is in context:

Now I must tell you that my whole life has been happiness. Through all of the misfortunes, etc., I did not plan anything. Life was there for me and I accepted it. And life, what ever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.

I hope I feel that way when I'm seventy.

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

TT: Closing the shop

Mrs. T and I are in Spring Green, Wisconsin, home of American Players Theatre, an outdoor amphitheatre where we'll be seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight and George Bernard Shaw's Widowers' Houses on Wednesday. I last visited Spring Green three years ago as part of a week-long marathon trip across the state during which I also stayed in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

Here's part of what I wrote about the company in 2005:

I started my week-long sweep across the state in Spring Green, a microscopic village (pop. 1,444) with two giant-sized claims to fame. Not only is it the site of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's eminently tourable home and headquarters, but just down the road from the Wright Visitors' Center is the American Players Theatre, a summer-and-fall repertory company that bills itself as "the most popular outdoor classical theater in the country." Located in a hollow at the top of a thickly wooded hill (it's a ten-minute walk from the parking lot to the theater), APT presents five plays each season in a 1,148-seat open-air amphitheater blessed with flawless acoustics.
Scenery isn't everything, natural or otherwise, but APT fills its naturally beautiful performing space with crisply staged classics that I might call "Broadway-quality" if I'd seen a Broadway revival lately that was half so good....

Today we'll be touring Taliesin, escorted by my friend Keiran Murphy, who showed me around on my last visit, an experience that ranks very high on my list of memorable days. I'll be surprised if Mrs. T doesn't find it equally entrancing.

I wrote and filed three pieces last week, meaning that I don't have to write anything else until we return home on Thursday night--a good thing, too, since I hate writing in hotel rooms and am still worn out from my recent travels. We're staying at the House on the Rock, a resort-attraction-inn (as the Web site describes it) that defies description, so I won't try to describe it, or anything else.

The truth is that I'm written out, too, and so won't be hearing from me again until next week, except for the usual almanac postings and theater-related stuff. A little silence never hurt anybody, least of all me.

See you around!

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

TT: Almanac

"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."

Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence"

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

TT: Snapshot

Mark Morris dances "Dido's Lament" from his staging of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group:

(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 August 27, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one."

Samuel Beckett, "Play"

Posted by About Last Night on August 28, 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:
• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASS:
• Noël Coward in Two Keys (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS:
• Othello/All's Well That Ends Well/The Ladies Man (Shakespeare/Feydeau, PG-13, not suitable for children, playing in festival repertory, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:
• Our Town (G, not suitable for young children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:
• All's Well That Ends Well/Bach in Leipzig/Burn This (Shakespeare/Moses/Wilson, PG-13, playing in festival repertory, reviewed here)

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

TT: Almanac

"Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing."

Samuel Butler, Notebooks

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

TT: If you've written me in the past three weeks...

...there's a very good chance that your e-mail got deleted. My blogmailbox gets crammed with press releases and spam, and I've been so busy traveling that I wasn't able to clean it out. Alas, it got cleaned out automatically, as I discovered last night. So if you wrote me and I didn't reply, please try again. I'll try to do better next time!

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

TT: The slapdash genius

Leonard Bernstein would have turned ninety years old on Monday. Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic have decided to mark the occasion by putting on a four-month festival called Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds that kicks off on September 24 with an all-Bernstein gala concert by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, followed by a whole lot of this and that.

I am, to put it mildly, skeptical about the motives behind such a celebration, which strike me as rather more commercial than artistic (why not wait until the centenary year?). But I'm not skeptical at all about Bernstein himself, who was by any imaginable standard a great artist--even though much of his work was a good deal less than great. So it seemed appropriate for me to take note of his ninetieth birthday by writing a "Sightings" column, and the results will appear in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal.

I invite you to take a peek. I've written a fair amount about Bernstein over the years, but I think this column is a pretty good summing-up of what made and makes him enduringly important.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: The two faces of Henry Higgins

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. A week after I wrapped up my furious circuit of New England summer theater festivals, today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the last of my reports on the shows I saw, the Ogunquit Playhouse's My Fair Lady in Maine and Goodspeed Musicals' Half a Sixpence, both of which delighted me. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Could it be that "My Fair Lady" is a better work of art than "Pygmalion"? Heresy! Heresy! Yet such things, after all, do happen. Many theatergoers, myself among them, believe that "Falstaff," Verdi's last opera, is a distinct improvement on Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and the musical that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapted in 1956 from George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play is at the very least better loved than its source, containing as it does such gilt-edged standards as "Get Me to the Church on Time," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," "On the Street Where You Live," "With a Little Bit of Luck" and "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" You can't go wrong with a score that good, and while "Pygmalion" has a satirical edge that is dulled in "My Fair Lady," Lerner's book was faithful for the most part to both the spirit and the letter of Shaw's great play.

33306660%5B1%5D.jpg Comparisons between the two shows were inevitably encouraged by the Roundabout Theatre Company's lively 2007 revival of "Pygmalion," but it's been a decade and a half since "My Fair Lady" was last seen on Broadway. So when the Ogunquit Playhouse announced that Jefferson Mays, the Henry Higgins of the Roundabout's "Pygmalion," would be playing the same role in its revival of "My Fair Lady," I decided at once to head north to Maine and check out his performance. It turned out to be exceptional, as did the rest of the production. Strongly cast and sharply directed by Shaun Kerrison, who also restaged the road-show version of Trevor Nunn's West End "My Fair Lady" revival that recently ended a 24-city U.S. tour, this modestly scaled staging is an immensely appealing piece of work that pleased me no end....

Pop quiz: What other musical about class warfare is based on a celebrated piece of Edwardian literature? Answer: "Half a Sixpence," now being performed to exhilarating effect by Goodspeed Musicals, was adapted by David Heneker and Beverley Cross from "Kipps," H.G. Wells' once-popular 1905 novel about a working-class draper's apprentice who inherits a fortune and is catapulted into the ranks of medium-high society. Needless to say, Cross' book retains little more than the bare outline of "Kipps," a 500-page socialist tract disguised as a Dickensian romance in which the author of "The War of the Worlds" railed against "the great stupid machine of retail trade," but the musical still manages to hint at Wells' righteous anger, albeit in much-blunted form....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Changing times

When Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans three years ago, OGIC and I temporarily turned this blog into an online clearinghouse for Web-based hurricane-related news and comment. We were--amazingly--the first and only bloggers to think of doing such a thing. Fortunately, the Web and the mainstream media have both changed greatly since 2005, and so I don't think our services will be needed this time around.

I do, however, want to post a link to Ridin' Gustav, a blog by an ex-Marine who's decided to hunker down in New Orleans and ride out the storm instead of joining in the evacuation:

I'd rather be on hand to help with the immediate aftermath if it's bad. Think of me as an unofficial First Responder. Rather be a sheepdog than a sheep.
So, I figured while I'm here, I might as well post an eyewitness account of the festivities. I've got still and video cameras, and will post what I can for as long as the power, and then my UPS, holds out.

I plan to keep an eye on this blog in the next few days. So should you.

Posted by About Last Night on August 31, 2008 5:55 PM | Permalink

FILM

Act of Violence. A hard, unrelenting 1949 film noir about a World War II vet (Van Heflin) who made a bad mistake and the crippled ex-friend (Robert Ryan at his tortured best) who means to make him pay for it. Directed with exceptional skill by Fred Zinnemann, this tough tale of postwar angst also features strong supporting performances by Janet Leigh (as Heflin's innocent young wife) and Mary Astor (as an aging hooker) and a memorable score by Bronislau Kaper. Noir wasn't MGM's strong suit, but this film is an exception to the rule (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 31, 2008 9:02 PM | Permalink

CD

Paul Moravec, Cool Fire/Chamber Symphony (Naxos, out Sept. 30). Two new large-scale pieces of chamber music by my Pulitzer Prize-winning operatic collaborator, performed to perfection by a group of instrumentalists from the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival and now available for pre-ordering from amazon.com. I wrote the liner notes: "Pure Moravec from first bar to last, full of heart-lifting melodies and enlivened by the proliferating rhythmic energy which propels the light-footed, almost Mendelssohnian scherzi that are to be found in most of Paul's multi-movement works. Note, too, the ingeniously wrought small-scale instrumentation, whose luminous transparency reminds me at times of Ravel." Yes, he's that good (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 31, 2008 9:14 PM | Permalink