About Last Night: December 2008 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power."

Marcel Marceau (quoted in U.S. News and World Report, Feb. 23, 1987)

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

TT: The Doctor is in

I regret to say that I didn't see Doctor Atomic, John Adams' new opera, when it came to the Metropolitan Opera last month. I had plays to review or was out of town throughout its too-short run. I did, however, pick up a copy of Adams' Hallelujah Junction: Composing an America Life, which was published a couple of months ago, and found it to be both readable and immensely interesting. Truth to tell, I can't think of a better memoir by a major American composer--and Adams undoubtedly qualifies as major, even though his minimalist music has never been my cup of tea. He's already made a deep impression on postwar American opera, and now that Paul Moravec and I are writing an opera of our own, it stands to reason that I'd take an interest in what Adams has to say in Hallelujah Junction about his own stage works.

What struck me most forcibly about Adams' account of the genesis of Doctor Atomic is that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way in which Paul and I have gone about writing The Letter. The differences are so vast, in fact, that it scarcely seems as though we're working in the same genre as Adams and Peter Sellars, who wrote--or, rather, compiled--the libretto for Doctor Atomic, a patchwork tapestry drawn from official documents, interview transcripts, and the poetry of Baudelaire, John Donne, and Muriel Rukeyser.

Most critics have been lukewarm at best about Sellars' libretto, and some wrote quite sharply about it. But music critics, even those who cover opera regularly, tend not to think in specifically stage-oriented terms, and I haven't read any reviews of the opera that cut to what I suspect was the heart of the matter, which is that Doctor Atomic, at least on paper, sounds more like an oratorio than an opera.

In works like Handel's Messiah or Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which are specifically intended for the concert hall rather than the stage, the singers and chorus describe and comment on dramatic situations rather than enacting them. From time to time opera companies attempt to put such essentially static works on stage--the Metropolitan Opera recently did just that with Berlioz's Damnation of Faust--but these presentations usually end up amounting to little more than a series of visually striking tableaus accompanied by music. The results may be interesting to look at, but they don't move. Road Show, Stephen Sondheim's new musical, is something like that. I described it in my Wall Street Journal review as "all tell and no show, a string of talky, undramatic ensemble numbers that feels more like an oratorio than a musical."

Might it be that Doctor Atomic suffers from a similar lack of dramatic momentum? Having read Hallelujah Junction, my guess is that this deficit, if such it be, didn't trouble John Adams in the slightest. His operas are intended to function not as conventional stage dramas but as mytho-poetical statements that are illustrative of larger ideas about the condition of man. Doctor Atomic, for instance, attempts to retell the Faust myth in specifically American terms, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who directed the research-and-development program that led to the building of the first atomic bomb, cast in the role of the all-too-human genius who sells his soul and lives to regret it.

In Hallelujah Junction Adams says matter-of-factly that Peter Sellars' libretto "was unlike anything the opera world had ever encountered," elsewhere implying that his musical setting of the words compiled by Sellars is theatrically problematic:

Doctor Atomic will never be an easy addition to the standard repertoire. The long, dreamlike second act will always present a challenge for directors and conductors. Where act I follows a more or less logical narrative thread, act II is a nearly ninety-minute symphonic arch that oscillates back and forth between a real-time event...and a willfully abstracted treatment of time and space that is part dream vision and part sudden, terrifying apparition.

All of which sounds fascinating, but not dramatic in the traditional sense of the word--though I hasten to point out that in the world of drama, there are many, many ways to skin a cat. Theater, as I have written elsewhere, is "an empirical art whose practitioners make their own rules." It is, first and foremost, about what works, and the fact that four major opera companies have produced Doctor Atomic to date suggests that it works.

The Letter is meant to work in another kind of way, one that arises in part from my experience as a critic who has spent much of his life looking at and writing about stage works of various kinds, opera very much included. This experience has taught me four things:

• Repertory opera is about emotions, not ideas. Thus the most important part of an opera libretto is not the language in which it is written but the dramatic gestures it makes. If the plot is involving and the music powerful, nobody will notice the words.

• Most repertory operas are structured like plays. They are plot-driven, not meditative. Even when they contain fantastic occurrences, the characters respond to them in a recognizably human way.

• On the other hand, opera is not a naturalistic medium, since the characters sing instead of speaking. This means that the libretto of a repertory opera cannot be written in straight prose. As Paul explained at the press conference in Santa Fe at which the cast and production team for The Letter were announced, "Terry's goal in writing the libretto was to take a prosy, naturalistic play and make it operatic, which means making it lyrical. That's what makes it singable. Opera is about heightened, larger-than-life emotions. If it isn't, there's no reason why the characters should be singing."

• Conversely, elaborately poetic language is usually superfluous and may even get in the composer's way. It's his job, not the librettist's, to create the poetic atmosphere of an opera.

These "rules" are normative, not absolute. I can think of any number of well-known operas that break one or more of them, and some of those operas--Capriccio, Four Saints in Three Acts, and The Midsummer Marriage come immediately to mind--are among my favorites. But none of them is popular. They have remained on the fringes of the repertory and are rarely revived.

Paul and I, by contrast, set out to write a repertory-style opera, one to which everyday operagoers would respond as readily as connoisseurs or intellectuals. As the librettist, it was my job to create the conditions under which Paul could compose such an opera. (I like to refer to myself as his "enabler.") Once he suggested that we might look to the works of Somerset Maugham for source material, I came up with the idea of adapting The Letter, a "well-made" stage play that was a hit in London and on Broadway and was later turned into an equally successful movie. Like most repertory operas, The Letter is devoid of Big Ideas--the passionate emotions of the characters are its subject matter--and the libretto is lyrical but for the most part not explicitly poetic.

Some people will doubtless conclude from this bald description that The Letter is less ambitious than Doctor Atomic, but I prefer to think that Paul and I have different ambitions for it. Is Rigoletto less ambitious--or less serious--than Götterdämmerung? No more, surely, than The Great Gatsby, with its melodramatic plot and novella-like scale, is less serious than War and Peace.

Asked to compare his operas to those of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, the composer-librettist of The Midsummer Marriage, replied that Britten was trying to create an English equivalent of verismo, the Italian style of operatic realism, while his own myth-based stage works were about "magic." Paul and I have never denied that the The Letter, like Britten's Peter Grimes, is at bottom a verismo opera. But as Miles Davis reportedly said to a journalist who accused him of having once been a pimp, "Wuz wrong with that?"

I love Tippett's music, but if I had to choose between The Midsummer Marriage and Peter Grimes--or between War and Peace and Gatsby, for that matter--I wouldn't hesitate for a moment before picking the latter. Nor would I think less of anyone else for making the opposite choice. Like I said, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

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

TT: Almanac

"Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even although he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable to him: his accurate power of examining and embodying human character and human passion, as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent of describing well what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character."

Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)

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

CAAF: From The Cat Lady Files

So, for the past couple months I've been locked in furious correspondence with the library about the new Emily Dickinson biography, which may just be the spinsteriest spinster sentence ever typed. (Nearest rival: "Oh, my cardigan is covered in cat hair, what a nuisance!") It's a long saga that started in summer, when I began monitoring the library's online catalog to see if they'd ordered a copy of White Heat, Brenda Wineapple's new book which focuses on Dickinson's friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which I've been aching to read. A month went by, the book showed up as being in "Technical Services," which meant it was getting a plastic cover and a stamp, etc., and I ordered it up to be delivered to my local branch, very pleased to be first in line. Another month went by -- and, well, this all gets a little tedious in the retelling. Basically, something in the system kept going awry and the book kept getting checked out from the library's Black Mountain branch (the book's eventual destination) despite my having a hold on it. And each time this happened I would email the library to see why, providing with each email a fulsome accounting of times and dates and possible (helpful!) explanations of what might be the cause of the glitch, while Lowell would stand by saying, "Let's just go buy the book, okay?" And then, three weeks later, the book would be returned to the library, I'd put another hold on it and before you could say, "spinstery spinster," it'd be checked out all over again.

Finally, on the third (fourth?) round of this I gave up and went and bought the book. I'm not so far in yet but I've already learned one great little factoid, although one not related to Dickinson. Did you know that Emerson once described Whitman's poetry as "disgusting priapism"? Looking it up, I think he was using the word in its secondary meaning ("prurient behavior or display") but if he meant the word's first meaning, it's a marvelous insult and really one that should get back in common usage. Like "bloviating," but better.

Posted by About Last Night on December 2, 2008 1:06 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you'll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday."

Alfred Döblin, Alexanderplatz, Berlin (trans. Eugene Jolas)

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

TT: Snapshot

Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five perform "Don't Worry 'Bout That Mule" in 1946:

(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 December 3, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Morning coffee

• Cinetrix finds awesome celeb memoir cover art. (And, as a commenter notes, the title's not too shabby either.)
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Something I looked at over Thanksgiving weekend. And looked and looked at. Idea for a future post: the difference between luxuritating in half a dozen Breugels in a single room and encountering a single Breugel in a sea of less-great art.
• An adolescent girl "is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs--to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others--are met precisely by the act of reading." Enough to make me order the first two novels in the Twilight series.

Posted by About Last Night on December 3, 2008 9:24 AM | Permalink

OGIC: "A vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood"

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Keats and "To Autumn," mentioning in passing the poet's contemporary critics. A reader wrote with further reflections on Keats's critical reception. He unfurls this more artfully than I possibly could, so here's his message in its entirety:

Reading your comments on Keats today, and especially your mention of his critics, moves me to share with you one of my very favorite passages. It is from a biography of Keats that was published in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After a single sentence giving the date and place of Keats' birth, the author moves directly into the critical history:
In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. His third book raised him at once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of them but Shelley so little of a marvelous boy and so suddenly revealed as a marvelous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. The Ode to a Nightingale, one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages, is immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the most vulgar and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood.

If that strikes you as unusual prosody for an encyclopedia, you are right. It is
Swinburne. On a few occasions I have, with some success, read this paragraph aloud
to auditors.

Just marvelous. Thank you, Bob.

Posted by About Last Night on December 3, 2008 10:42 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There are few things I enjoy so much as talking to people about books which I have read but they haven't, and making them wish they had--preferably a book that is hard to get or in a language that they do not know."

Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light

Posted by About Last Night on December 4, 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, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Dividing the Estate * (black comedy, G, far too serious for children, reviewed here)
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)
• Irving Berlin's White Christmas (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• A Man for All Seasons * (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable BACK%20BACK%20BACK.tiff for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Back Back Back (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 25, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

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

CAAF: A murder of crows

The woods near our house are well populated with crows. This fall may have been tough on squirrels, but the crows appear to be flourishing; the ones I see are mammoth, glossy beasts. They've been around all year but with the leaves gone and the sky so gray, the woods seem emptier lately and I notice them more.

When I see a crowd of them, I sometimes think about David Copperfield's childhood home, The Rookery, which gets explained in the first chapter of the novel this way:

"In the name of Heaven," said Miss Betsey, suddenly, "why Rookery?"

"Do you mean the house, ma'am?" asked my mother.

"Why Rookery?" said Miss Betsey. "Cookery would have been more to the purpose, if you had had any practical ideas of life, either of you."

"The name was Mr. Copperfield's choice," returned my mothe. "When he bought the house, he liked to think there were rooks about it."

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind, some weather-beaten ragged old rooks'-nests burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea.

"Where are the birds?" asked Miss Betsey.

"The----?" My mother had been thinking of something else.

"The rooks--what has become of them?" asked Miss Betsey.

"There have not been any since we have lived here," said my mother. "We thought--Mr. Copperfield thought--it was quite a larger rookery; but the nests were very old ones, and the birds have deserted them a long while."

"David Copperfield all over!" cried Miss Betsey. "David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust because he sees the nests!"

Rookeries are, of course, all over English novels and as a kid I somehow formed the impression that they were a man-made addition to the grounds of a home, like a super-gothic chicken coop. Looking it up this morning I see it'd be hard to cultivate crows for picturesque advantage:

Rooks and jackdaws like to roost together, but prefer to build their nests in different sites: Jackdaws prefer holes in trees whereas rooks nest in colonies in tall trees called rookeries. 
Human structures are seldom used. For rooks to leave a rookery was considered a bad omen for those who owned the land.

That last bit adds to the doomed chord sounded in that opening passage in David Copperfield: Not only had the rooks abandoned the home, they took all the luck with them.

Posted by About Last Night on December 4, 2008 1:04 PM | Permalink

TT: Are you a Brit?

If so, perhaps you can answer the following question for me: is it idiomatic for an Englishman to refer to his lawyer as "counselor" in direct address? (Example: "Well, counselor, do you think you're going to be able to get me acquitted?") I put such a sentence into the mouth of one of the characters in the libretto of The Letter, and Jonathan Kent, our director, asked me yesterday whether that usage might possibly be an Americanism. Alas, neither of us is sure, so I'm seeking a second opinion.

Would anyone who can speak to this question with expert knowledge please drop me a line as soon as possible?

Posted by About Last Night on December 4, 2008 2:26 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives."

Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

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

TT: Get small

I go to a lot of out-of-town shows in between Broadway openings, but my reviewing calendar is so crowded that I inevitably miss out on some of the ones that I most wanted to see. Right now, for instance, Long Beach Playhouse is putting on John van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle, a poignant three-character comedy about love in wartime that has a small but significant place in American theatrical history. It opened in 1943 and ran for 1,557 performances, making it Broadway's eighth longest-running straight play--yet The Voice of the Turtle has never been revived on the Great White Way since the original production closed in 1948.

With the financial crunch hitting New York producers where it hurts, I've written a "Sightings" column about high-quality small-cast plays that either never made it to Broadway or, like The Voice of the Turtle, haven't been seen there for decades. Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal and you'll find an annotated list of five such plays, all of which (A) can be produced cheaply and (B) lend themselves to the celebrity casting without which it is no longer possible to open a straight play on Broadway.

* * *

Here's a list of the ten longest-running straight plays in Broadway history:

• Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, Life With Father, opened 1939, 3,224 performances

• Jack Kirkland, Tobacco Road, opened 1933, 3,182 performances

• Anne Nichols, Abie's Irish Rose, opened 1922, 2,327 performances

• Ira Levin, Deathtrap, opened 1978, 1,793 performances

• Albert Innaurato, Gemini, opened 1977, 1,788 performances

• Garson Kanin, Born Yesterday, opened 1946, 1,642 performances

• Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary, opened 1961, 1,572 performances

• John van Druten, The Voice of the Turtle, opened 1943, 1,557 performances

• Neil Simon, Barefoot in the Park, opened 1963, 1,530 performances

• Neil Simon, Brighton Beach Memoirs, opened 1983, 1,530 performances.

For what it's worth, none of these plays has ever been successfully revived on Broadway. I wonder why? Maybe that's another column....

* * *

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

The other plays on my list, in case you're wondering, are Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking, David Ives' Ancient History, Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell.

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

TT: Get thee to New Jersey

This was a good theatergoing week for me, and today's Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my pleasure. I review two shows, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's production of The Winter's Tale and the York Theatre Company's off-Broadway premiere of My Vaudeville Man!. Both are excellent. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Some Shakespeare plays are inescapable, others all but invisible. I usually catch two or three "Macbeths" a season, but more than two years have gone by since I last saw "The Winter's Tale" on stage. Now the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, a troupe that always delivers the goods, has taken up the cause of "The Winter's Tale" with a production directed by Brian B. Crowe that ranks high on the list of first-class Shakespeare stagings to come my way in recent years. Intimate in scale, unassumingly intelligent in style and acted by an exceptional cast, it makes easy sense out of a play that, like "Cymbeline," is widely and wrongly thought to be difficult.

What makes "The Winter's Tale" so tricky is that its two halves don't seem to fit together, at least not neatly. The first part is a fast-moving tragedy that ends in black disaster, the second a sunny romance in which some (but not all) of the initial horrors are undone by a climactic stroke of magic. How to smooth over the sudden change of tone? Mr. Crowe and his cast operate on the assumption that there's no problem to be solved. Leontes (Robert Gomes), the Sicilian king whose inexplicable fit of jealous rage brings about the death of his wife (Linda Powell) and young son (Jesse Easterling), behaves exactly like what he is, a man who is first driven mad by suspicion, then redeemed by remorse. Mr. Gomes' febrile performance is so believable as to make you feel that he's earned the second chance at happiness that Shakespeare gives him...

Written by Jeff Hochhauser and Bob Johnston, "My Vaudeville Man!" is based on "Letters of a Hoofer to His Ma," the epistolary autobiography of Jack Donahue, a real-life vaudevillian who ran away from home at the age of 17 to pursue a life on the wicked stage, much to the dismay of his mother, a hard-bitten Irish immigrant who took for granted that her son would go the way of his father, a ne'er-do-well drunkard. She was half right. Donahue became a Broadway star but died of alcoholism in 1930, leaving behind the short, sweet memoir from which Messrs. Hochhauser and Johnston have constructed this musical version of his youthful misadventures on the New England vaudeville circuit. The book is a neat piece of theatrical carpentry, the songs agreeable period pastiches that keep the action moving. Nothing very surprising ever happens, nor does it need to: "My Vaudeville Man!" is an uncomplicated crowd-pleaser that gets the job done with plenty of room to spare.

Shonn Wiley plays Donahue, Karen Murphy his mother, and both are wondrously fine. Mr. Wiley is, in fact, something of a find, a fresh-faced song-and-dance man who tears into his routines with the utmost gusto....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Much obliged

Yesterday's query about whether it's an Americanism to use the word "counselor" in direct address to a lawyer (i.e., "Well, counselor, do you think you're going to be able to get me acquitted?") brought a half-dozen prompt responses, both from English readers of "About Last Night" and from well-informed Americans. All agreed that, as James Hamilton put it, "an Englishman wouldn't address his solicitor with any title beyond 'Mr. [name]'."

Thanks to Mr. Hamilton, Kenny Harris, Timothy Hulsey, David Mackinder, Alex Massie, and fellow blogger Jenny Davidson for setting me straight. And special thanks to Ted Iacobuzio, who suggested "learned friend" as an alternative. That may make it into the revised libretto of The Letter, depending on whether it works in context.

Isn't the Web cool? Not only am I the first librettist to blog about the creation of an opera, but I'm now the first to request and receive technical assistance from his readers!

Posted by About Last Night on December 5, 2008 9:54 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A hobby is not a holiday. It is not merely a momentary relaxation necessary to the renewal of work; and in this respect it must be sharply distinguished from much that is called sport. A good game is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as a hobby; and many go golfing or shooting grouse because this is a concentrated form of recreation; just as what our contemporaries find in whisky is a concentrated form of what our fathers found diffused in beer. If half a day is to take a man out of himself, or make a new man of him, it is better done by some sharp competitive excitement like sport. But a hobby is not half a day but half a life-time. It would be truer to accuse the hobbyist of living a double life. And hobbies, especially such hobbies as the toy theatre, have a character that runs parallel to practical professional effort, and is not merely a reaction from it. It is not merely taking exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing."

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

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

TT: Frosting on the cake

I'm up in Connecticut with Mrs. T, doing as little as possible in between spells of overwork. We watched old movies all weekend, the best of which were Payment Deferred (not on video, alas), Trouble in Paradise, and Twentieth Century, and I unwound by reading five Elmore Leonard novels. Yesterday morning we drove through a snow shower to have brunch at Still River Café, a wonderful restaurant located more or less in the middle of nowhere. Along the way we passed a white-frosted creek that reminded me of John Twachtman's "Winter Harmony," one of my favorite American paintings, and I marveled at my happiness and good fortune.

The fun, alas, ends tomorrow--I'll be returning to New York to see two shows, write two pieces, get a tooth pulled, buy Christmas presents, and do whatever else needs to be done--but I'm not complaining. Except for the tooth, I have no right or reason to complain. It hardly seems possible that I was dying three years ago this week. Those terrible days now seem far, far away.

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

TT: Almanac

"I have never thought about what I was doing in terms of art, or 'this is great,' or 'world-shaking,' or anything like that. To me, it was always a job of work--which I enjoyed immensely--and that's it."

John Ford, interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich (1966)

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

TT: A doll's house

Paul Moravec and I went to the New York office of the Santa Fe Opera last week to get our first look at the set designs for The Letter. They were created by Hildegard Bechtler, who is currently represented on Broadway by The Seagull. Hildegard lives in Germany and does most of her work for European theaters, so Paul and I met her for the first time at the design presentation (as such occasions are called). Also on hand was Jonathan Kent, the director of The Letter, who lives in England and whom the two of us hadn't seen for a year and a half. Jonathan and Hildegard, as is customary in theatrical projects, jointly worked out a visual interpretation of the opera, after which Hildegard created the finished design. They used my libretto as a point of departure, but from then on they were on their own.

Once the introductions were out of the way, Paul and I rushed across the room to see what our far-flung collaborators had wrought. Sitting atop a grand piano was a scale model of the stage of the 2,100-seat Crosby Theatre inside which Hildegard had constructed a miniature version of the set for The Letter. It looked like a giant-sized doll's house, right down to the tiny figures that represented the various characters. We gaped at the model, temporarily stunned into silence. I know how it feels to see the design for the dust jacket of a book that I've written, but that's different: the cover is not the book. An opera, on the other hand, truly exists only in performance, and must be created anew each time it is produced: the score is not the show. As I saw how Hildegard had transformed my libretto into a three-dimensional object, a Biblical phrase popped into my mind: Thus the word was made as flesh.

STAGE%20IN%20DAYLIGHT.tiff The process of putting theatrical flesh on the musico-literary bones of The Letter is complicated further by the fact that the Crosby Theater is nothing like the old-fashioned Broadway theaters in which I spend so much of my working life as a critic. Not only does it have no proscenium arch or curtain, but the shape of the stage is decidedly out of the ordinary. Here's how Paul Horpedahl, Santa Fe's production director, describes it:

Our stage has side walls that are curved out, much like the shape of a speaker horn. Each of these walls is made up of six pairs of double doors for stage access. Additionally, there are sliding door panels at the back of the stage that allow for opening up to the landscape. The width of the stage at the apron is fifty-seven feet and narrows upstage at the back sliding doors to thirty-six feet. The depth to those doors is forty-one feet and the total depth to the scenery elevator is fifty feet. The ceiling above the stage is twenty-two feet at the doors and twenty-four feet at the apron. There is no fly tower and all lighting is hung up inside the ceiling so as not to be seen by the audience.

To put these numbers in perspective, the unusually large but otherwise traditional proscenium arch of the stage of the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House is fifty-four feet square, while the American Airlines Theatre, the 740-seat Broadway house where the Roundabout Theatre Company is currently performing A Man for All Seasons, has a stage opening that is forty feet wide and twenty-five feet high.

Because the Crosby Theater has no curtain, all scene changes take place in full view of the audience, and the absence of a fly tower means that backdrops and large set pieces cannot be shifted by "flying" them to and from the stage. This makes it a tricky space in which to present The Letter, which plays without interruption and takes place in five different locations:

• The living room of the jungle bungalow of Leslie and Robert Crosbie

• The Singapore law office of Howard Joyce, Leslie's lawyer and Robert's best friend

• Leslie's jail cell

• The men's bar of the Singapore Club

• The courtroom in which Leslie is on trial for murdering Geoff Hammond, her lover

But first-rate directors and designers like nothing better than to be asked to do the impossible, and Hildegard and Jonathan rose without apparent effort to the formidable challenge of creating a visual environment in which The Letter can be performed in such a way as to make dramatic sense to the viewer.

"Our goal was to create a cinematic design, one in which the action can move in a continuous flow," Jonathan said at the start of the presentation. To this end, all five locations in the opera are portrayed on a single unit set consisting of two diagonally converging walls separated by an upstage opening. One wall, which is curved, consists of a series of louvered wooden doors. Except for a pair of non-identical doorways, the other wall is meant to look flat and solid--even though it isn't. Both walls lend themselves to the shadowy film noir-style lighting that Paul and I have always envisioned as part of the "look" of The Letter.

Needless to say, there's a lot more to the set than that, but I don't want to give away any of Hildegard's scenic surprises. Suffice it to say that in the nightmare world of The Letter, nothing is quite as it seems.

After Paul and I stopped babbling excited superlatives and pulled ourselves together, Jonathan and Hildegard walked us through the opera, demonstrating how the set will shift from scene to scene. 51D52Y83RKL._SL500_AA240_.jpg As they moved the set pieces and cardboard singers by hand, I felt as if the four of us were children playing with a freshly opened toy theater on Christmas morning. Of course we were engaged in a deadly serious job of work--we were, among other things, deciding how vast amounts of the Santa Fe Opera's time and money would be spent on creating a theatrical illusion--but it didn't feel anything like work.

Jonathan asked us if we had any questions. Paul and I burst out laughing and high-fived each other. "I never imagined that it would look this beautiful," I said. Then we rolled up our sleeves and immersed ourselves in the complicated business of settling on exact timings for the between-scene interludes. Since The Letter plays continuously from start to finish, Paul must compose orchestral interludes that will not only carry the audience from one scene to the next but also give the cast and crew sufficient time to change costumes and shift the set. Paul Horpedahl assured us that none of the scene changes would take longer than forty-five seconds to complete, but Jonathan estimated that we'd need a full minute to get from Leslie's cell to the Singapore Club, so we decided to play it safe.

We would have been more than glad to spend the rest of the afternoon playing with our new friends and our new toy, but everyone had places to go, ourselves included, so at last we said our reluctant farewells. I bumped into Brad Woolbright, the Santa Fe Opera's artistic administrator, as I was putting on my coat.

"I guess you guys might actually decide to go ahead and do our opera now, huh?" I said, trying in vain to keep a straight face.

"We're giving it serious thought," Brad replied without cracking a smile.

UPDATE: If you came here via Andrew Sullivan, you'll want to read this.

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

TT: Almanac

"I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not."

Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

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

TT: Out of commission

41iOCS5pk9L._SL160_AA160_.jpg I'm having a tooth pulled this morning. If you need anything, ask me tomorrow.

UPDATE: I'm home again, in two pieces and under doctor's orders to take it easy for the rest of the day, a commitment I was more than happy to make. I have a mouthful of gauze and a numb left nostril, but otherwise I feel perfectly fine.

In honor of Dr. Richard Giannandrea, the deft practitioner of painless dentistry who did the job on me, here's an encore presentation of one of the funniest moments of my adolescence:

Posted by About Last Night on December 10, 2008 7:22 AM | Permalink

TT: Else what's a metaphor?

I see that Patrick Appel, Andrew Sullivan's stand-in, has nominated me for a poseur award for having written the following paragraph in yesterday's posting about The Letter:

I know how it feels to see the design for the dust jacket of a book that I've written, but that's different: the cover is not the book. An opera, on the other hand, truly exists only in performance, and must be created anew each time it is produced: the score is not the show. As I saw how Hildegard had transformed my libretto into a three-dimensional object, a Biblical phrase popped into my mind: Thus the word was made as flesh.

Not having read "The Daily Dish" for a number of years, I didn't know that Sullivan had acquired a "trusty colleague" (his phrase). Alas, the colleague in question wasn't very trustworthy on this occasion, or very knowledgeable.

Needless to say, only a poseur of the highest possible voltage would have compared himself to the incarnate Christ--and I didn't. "Thus the word was made as flesh" is not a literal quotation from John 1:14. It is, rather, a metrical paraphrase of the Latin translation of the first six words of that familiar verse, and it comes from one of the many English-language versions of "Verbum caro factum est," Hans Leo Hassler's popular sixteenth-century Christmas motet:

I sang that lovely motet in high school long, long ago, which explains why the anonymous translator's euphonious rendering of the Biblical phrase that is its title happened to come to mind as a metaphorical description of what it feels like to have your words turned into a set design.

Most literate people, of course, know a metaphor when they see one, but you can't please everyone....

UPDATE: Thank you, Megan, Isaac and Alex.

The ongoing controversy over this posting and its predecessor, by the way, has octupled the number of midweek hits normally received by "About Last Night." Repeat after me: there is no bad publicity!

Posted by About Last Night on December 10, 2008 5:42 PM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Lawrence Tibbett sings "Votre toast" (from Bizet's Carmen) in Metropolitan:

(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 December 10, 2008 7:56 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."

Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain

Posted by About Last Night on December 11, 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, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Dividing the Estate * (black comedy, G, far too serious for children, reviewed here)
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)
• Irving Berlin's White Christmas * (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• A Man for All Seasons * (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, not suitable for small children, closes Dec. 28, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Back Back Back (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 25, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• My Vaudeville Man! (musical, G, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

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

TT: Almanac

"The time to make up your mind about people, is never."

Philip Barry, The Philadelphia Story

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

TT: Touched with fire

I review two off-Broadway plays in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, Friendly Fire's revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet and the Playwrights Horizons premiere of Craig Lucas' Prayer for My Enemy. The first is masterly, the second awful. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Eugene O'Neill is the most frustrating of major playwrights, for his output was so uneven and his craft so unsure that even the best of his plays can be made to look amateurish by a weak staging. I was fooled, for instance, by the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2005 revival of "A Touch of the Poet," which was so far off the mark that I mistakenly thought the play itself was at fault. Unlike that over-fancy production, Friendly Fire's Off-Broadway staging is a bargain-basement affair acted on the plainest of sets by a cast consisting mostly of near-unknowns--but it packs the punch of a bullet in the belly.

Daniel J. Travanti, to be sure, isn't exactly unknown: He was the star of "Hill Street Blues," one of the most admired TV series of the '80s. My guess, though, is that his name will be unfamiliar to younger readers, since he's spent the past couple of decades working in regional theater and appearing in forgettable made-for-TV movies. His 2007 Off-Broadway performance in Oren Safdie's "The Last Word..." was the first time he'd acted on a New York stage, and this is the second. Yet Mr. Travanti is galvanically powerful as Con Melody, a drunken tavernkeeper who once was an officer and a gentleman and hates the lesser man he has become. On paper Mr. Travanti is miscast--he's 68, nearly a quarter-century older than the character he's playing--and his ferocious performance is devoid of the decayed Irish charm that O'Neill seems to have had in mind. Instead he gives us an angry failure who is teetering on the far edge of madness, an interpretation that may well be "wrong" (whatever that means) but is still tremendously exciting. If Con had lived as long as Mr. Travanti, I feel sure that this is what he would have become....

Craig Lucas has written good plays--I very much liked "Small Tragedy"--but "Prayer for My Enemy" is a mess, a mishmash of mawkish clichés that tries frantically to sound profound.

In order of appearance, Mr. Lucas gives us:

• Billy, who joined the Army to prove that he was a real man. Yes, he got sent to Iraq. Yes, he got wounded there. Yes, he's against the war ("It's bad because it was bad before we got there and now it's bad in a new way"). Yes, he's gay. Yes, he's in denial about it.

• Tad, a bisexual slacker who slept with Billy in high school and wants to do it again.

• Dolores, a motor-mouthed neurotic.

• Marianne, Billy's unhappy older sister, whom Tad impregnates and marries even though he still has the hots for Billy. Yes, she's been divorced. Yes, she has a child by her first husband. Yes, her son is autistic....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Almanac

"Since my marriage I have found all women beautiful."

Eric Rohmer, screenplay for Love in the Afternoon

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

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

• Mrs. T, with whom I watch a lot of old movies on TV, pointed out the other night that I have a pronounced weakness for the sort of woman known to fans of P.G. Wodehouse as a good egg. Alas, Wodehouse never described any of his good eggs in detail, but Raymond Chandler carved the type in stone when he wrote about Anne Riordan in Farewell, My Lovely:

She was about twenty-eight years old. She had a rather narrow forehead of more height than is considered elegant. Her nose was small and inquisitive, her upper lip a shade too long and her mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes were gray-blue with flecks of gold in them. She had a nice smile. She looked as if she had slept well. It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out....
You could get to like that face a lot. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear.

Midge, the character played by Barbara Bel Geddes in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, is Hollywood's quintessential good egg: bright and funny, spunky and plucky, pretty but not sultry, impeccably trustworthy in a pinch. Needless to say, such wondrous, indispensable creatures usually receive third or fourth billing--the only one I can think of who is the indisputable star of the film in which she appears is Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats & Dogs--and tend not to get the guy. Yet they rarely fail to win my heart. Eve Arden in Anatomy of a Murder, Jeff Donnell in Sweet Smell of Success, Celeste Holm in Road House, Ruth Hussey in The Philadelphia Story, Virginia Huston in Out of the Past, Nancy Olson in Sunset Boulevard, Jane Randolph in Cat People, Ann Sheridan in Kings Row, Teresa Wright in just about anything: these are my kind of women and always have been, both on the screen and in real life.

You won't be surprised, then, to learn that while a number of my best friends are exceedingly good eggs, I've never been drawn to femmes fatales, nor have I fallen victim at any time in my life to the half-mad romantic obsession that is the stuff of innumerable films and novels (though I do know all about the pain of unrequited love!). Apparently my temperament is too equable to make me susceptible to that particular form of lunacy.

This may explain why I prefer North by Northwest to Vertigo, and why I have long believed that comedy is truer to life than tragedy--but it does nothing whatsoever to explain why a person of my reasonably even-keeled temperament should have wanted to turn The Letter into an opera. Perhaps Truman Capote explained it when he said that "the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in the reader."

Whatever the reason, I continue to prefer good eggs to glamour pusses, and probably always will. Like Philip Marlowe says, they wear better.

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

CD

Schubert Piano Trios (ArtistLed). Magnificently played performances of Schubert's resplendent B Flat and E Flat Trios by Philip Setzer, David Finckel and Wu Han. It's all in the family: Setzer and Finckel play violin and cello in the Emerson String Quartet, while Wu Han, the brilliant pianist, is Finckel's wife. As for the record label, it's a mom-and-pop Web-based operation run out of the Finckels' New York apartment--but rest assured that there's nothing remotely amateurish about the playing or production on this must-have album (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on December 15, 2008 6:28 PM | Permalink

BOOK

Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar/The Golden Spiders. So you've never read a Nero Wolfe mystery and want to know the best way to make the acquaintance of the portly detective who raises orchids, never leaves his New York brownstone on business, and leaves the legwork (and narration) to his trusty assistant Archie Goodwin. What's your next move? I suggest that you order a copy of this double-decker Bantam paperback that reprints two of the best Wolfe novels, the first originally published in 1939 and the second in 1953. Rex Stout's witty, fast-moving prose hasn't dated a day, while Wolfe himself is one of the enduringly great eccentrics of popular fiction. I've spent the past three decades reading and re-reading Stout's novels for pleasure, and they have yet to lose their savor (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on December 15, 2008 6:36 PM | Permalink

DVD

The Man Who Came to Dinner. With one exception, Hollywood did poorly by the plays of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. This screen version of their most enduringly popular comedy, released in 1942, is the only Kaufman-Hart film that clearly suggests the theatrical quality of the play on which it's based, in large part because Monty Woolley, who created the role of Sheridan Whiteside on Broadway, repeated his justly celebrated performance for the cameras. Yes, it's stagy, but so was the irascible Whiteside, a (barely) fictional portrait of Alexander Woollcott, and Woolley played him with enormous relish and malice aforethought. Don't ask me why Bette Davis was cast as the good-egg heroine--she's soooo not the type--but everyone else is competent or better, while the script, by Julius and Philip Epstein, sticks surprisingly close to the play. Jimmy Durante, of all people, plays Banjo, a character based on Harpo Marx, and does it well (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on December 15, 2008 6:47 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I thought as you got older you needed less loving but, in fact, you need more."

Alan Ayckbourn, Intimate Exchanges

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

TT: Confessions of an ageist

A reader writes:

I saw your review of A Man for All Seasons before going and noticed your warning about bringing any children to the play. I assumed that meant young teens as well. But I wanted two of my boys (twelve and fifteen) to see a play and not waste time or money on some Broadway fluff that wouldn't appeal to them anyway. So I showed them the movie first, a favorite of mine, to acquaint them with the dialogue and meaning of the play beforehand. Last night we saw the performance and they enjoyed it. (Or as much as two boys of that age can.) It was the preparation that sealed the deal. If the play were long running, I would have suggested it to many more friends with kids that age.
Of course these kids are home-schooled, so maybe that made a difference in their attention spans. Who knows? But surely we should be encouraging parents to take the young to more than only the shows like Mamma Mia or Mary Poppins.

Indeed we should, which is why I found this e-mail so valuable. I described A Man for All Seasons (which closed last weekend) as "too intellectually demanding for children of any age" in my weekly theater roundup. Obviously I was wrong to use such unequivocally categorical language! To be sure, I don't usually have teenagers in mind when I use the word "children" in the weekly roundup. It'd never have occurred to me to take my eleven-year-old nephew to see A Man for All Seasons, but I'm pretty sure that I would have enjoyed seeing it when I was fifteen. (I wish I'd seen the movie back then.)

That said, it's my job to be as clear as possible when "rating" the plays that I review, so I'll keep this exchange in mind from now on.

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

TT: Almanac

"'Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing-I kind of like to figure out what the guy's thinking by what he says. I like some description too,' he went on. 'I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it--but not too much of that.'"

John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

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

TT: Snapshot

Ida Lupino sings "One for My Baby" and "Again" in Jean Negulesco's Road House (1948):

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

BOOK

Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (Yale, $35). New from the author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, the first book-length study of how France's culturati coped with the German occupation. The answer is in the title. Virtually all French artists played ball with the Nazis in one way or another, and some of the greatest (including the incomparable pianist Alfred Cortot) did their bidding with foul alacrity. Spotts' book is insufficiently detailed and lacks full source notes, but the story it tells is both true and compelling--as well as depressing. Anyone naïve enough to think of artists as a nobler breed should read it and weep (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on December 17, 2008 10:18 AM | Permalink

TT: Fully freshened

Check out the top-five and "Out of the Past" modules of the right-hand column, where you'll find lots of interesting new stuff--just in time for Christmas!

Posted by About Last Night on December 17, 2008 10:24 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more--no, I don't want to know--about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting."

Ingmar Bergman on Alfred Hitchcock (quoted in John Simon, Ingmar Bergman Directs)

Posted by About Last Night on December 18, 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)
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 11, 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:
• Back Back Back (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 25, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• My Vaudeville Man! (musical, G, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Dividing the Estate * (black comedy, G, far too serious for pre-teens, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Irving Berlin's White Christmas * (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, not suitable for small children, closes Dec. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY
• A Touch of the Poet (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

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

TT: For geeks only

Seen on a bumper sticker: FREE THE BOUND PERIODICALS.

Posted by About Last Night on December 18, 2008 7:44 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"All works of art bear the artist's signature. If there is no signature, there is no work of art. And by 'art,' I don't mean only paintings, sculpture, films, plays: I mean anything in life that is done well and carefully. In my opinion, our age commits its greatest crime when it kills the author or makes him disappear. Before what we call progress, a man who made dishes was expressing his personality just as much as Picasso does in his paintings. Today this is no longer true."

Jean Renoir (interviewed in Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors)

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

TT: Whitewashing August Wilson

In April Lincoln Center Theater will be presenting a Broadway revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the first in more than two decades. The director will be Bartlett Sher--who is white. That fact is, not surprisingly, causing a stink, since the play has an all-black cast. One black stage director, Marion McClinton, has gone so far as to accuse Lincoln Center of "institutional racism."

Naturally I took an interest in this story, being an admirer (albeit qualified) of Wilson's plays and a generally enthusiastic but sometimes skeptical supporter of color-blind "non-traditional" casting. Hence my latest "Sightings" column, in which I take a closer look at the decision to hire Sher, along with the wider question of how best to present plays originally written for performance by an ethnically specific ensemble.

Will we be seeing Al Pacino in Fences any time soon? For the answer, pick up a copy of Saturday's Wall Street Journal and give me a read.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

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

TT: Stuck with Shrek

'Tis the season for new Broadway musicals, and I review two of them in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, Shrek the Musical and Pal Joey, along with a holiday show, Hartford Stage's production of A Christmas Carol. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

You're not going to be able to wiggle out of taking your children to see "Shrek the Musical," so let me start with some good news: The sets and costumes are dynamite. They ought to be. This production is said to have cost $25 million, and looks it. Tim Hatley, the designer, has somehow contrived to create a real-life counterpart to the high-tech storybook look of the 2001 animated feature on which "Shrek" is based. Not only do the characters bear an uncanny resemblance to their digitally animated counterparts, but the show flies from scene to scene at near-cinematic velocity. The whole thing is downright uncanny, and enormous fun to behold.

The other glad tiding is that Sutton Foster, who plays Fiona, the sweet and lovely princess who falls in love with a stinky, grumpy ogre (Brian d'Arcy James), is her usual adorable self. Sweetness can be exasperating on stage, but Ms. Foster, Broadway's biggest charmer, is so full of spunk that even the most vinegary of grouches will find her hard to resist. I didn't even try, though I'd rather have seen Ms. Foster in...oh, "Peter Pan." Or a revival of "The Drowsy Chaperone." I'd have even settled for "The Sound of Music."

Which brings us to the heart of the matter: "Shrek" is for kids, and no one else. If yours liked the movie, they'll like the musical, which has been cunningly calculated to rope in the present-day pre-teen crowd. The book and lyrics, by David Lindsay-Abaire, mirror the film's jeering humor with perfect precision: Take your fluffy fun/And shove it where the sun don't shine! Most of the jokes are of the insult-and-bodily-function genre ("Shrek" is powered less by electricity than by natural gas). Nor are we spared the starchy pro-tolerance agitprop that long ago became compulsory in cartoons...

The best way to appreciate the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of "Pal Joey"--the only way, really--is to approach it not as a revival but as a brand-new show that just happens to have the same score as its predecessor of the same name. Do that and you'll find it somewhat easier to savor the performances of Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton and Jenny Fellner. If, on the other hand, you know "Pal Joey" more than casually and love it for its own sour-souled, hard-boiled sake, you're going to have a tough time sitting through this slicked-up rewrite of one of the best musicals of the 20th century....

The Roundabout, as best as I can figure, has decided to sell "Pal Joey" by selling it out. In this production, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, the show is retrofitted as a glossy school-of-Fosse extravaganza. The fancy sets and showy steps, while pleasing enough in their own right, have little to do with the seedy, sordid world that John O'Hara conjured out of thin air in his very first stage direction: "A cheap night club, on the South Side of Chicago. Not cheap in the whorehouse way, but strictly a neighborhood joint." Richard Greenberg, one of my least favorite contemporary playwrights, has rewritten O'Hara's book from curtain to curtain, replacing his sharp-eared dialogue with lame, campy punch lines and smoothing out the rough edges of the plot in a way that is alien to the flint-hearted spirit of the real "Pal Joey."...

Michael Wilson, who directed the Broadway transfer of "Dividing the Estate," is better known as the artistic director of Hartford Stage, which is currently performing his adaptation of "A Christmas Carol." I rarely go out of my way to see seasonal fare, which runs to the dutiful, but I've been so impressed by Mr. Wilson's previous work that I decided to make an exception. I'm glad I did: "A Christmas Carol" is outstandingly well-performed and fabulously well-crafted, a merry medley of trap doors, flying ghosts and thunderous sound effects that tickles the senses without insulting the intelligence....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Watch my wsj.com video review of Shrek here:

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

THE COLOR BIND

"If August Wilson is a major playwright, then surely part of the proof of his stature lies in the ability of his work to speak to all men in all conditions. This explains why white audiences can appreciate his plays, and why white directors can stage them, too, so long as they do their cultural homework..."

Posted by About Last Night on December 20, 2008 3:44 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Something in me resists the calendar expectation of happiness. Merry Christmas yourself! it mutters as it shapes a ghostly grin."

J.B. Priestley, Outcries and Asides

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

TT: One more one more time

I got an e-mail last week from Andrea Schulz, my editor at Harcourt, telling me that the sales and marketing people were dissatisfied with "A Cluster of Sunlight" as a title for my Louis Armstrong biography. "No one feels a sense of Armstrong emanating from it," she told me apologetically. "They want something more straightforward." I gnashed my teeth for a moment, then set to the task of coming up with yet another title. I'm relieved to say that it wasn't hard. All I had to do was consult the following footnote on page nine of the first chapter, in which I describe a televised encounter between Armstrong and Edward R. Murrow:

In Armstrong's diphthong-rich New Orleans accent, so similar to that of deepest Brooklyn, "Murrow" became "MOY-roh." It was less surprising that Murrow should have called him "Louie." "All White Folks call me Louie," he wrote in 1944. Many blacks did so, too, including most of his sidemen and at least one of his four wives, though he pronounced his first name "LEW-is," as can be heard on his 1963 recording of "Hello, Dolly!" "Satchmo," his favorite nickname, was rarely used by his closest friends, who usually called him "Pops." (Armstrong had trouble remembering names, and fell early on into the habit of addressing anyone whose real name slipped his mind as "Pops.")

Everyone I know who knew Armstrong personally has told me at one time or another that my book ought to be called "Pops." I suggested it to Andrea, who ran it past the sales people. On Friday she reported back as follows: "I think we've got consensus for 'Pops.' How does that work for you? I think it would make a good strong cover, too." I agree, so that's that--I think. As of today, I am officially the author of Pops: The Life of Louis Armstrong, out next fall from Harcourt.

Take a bow, Pops.

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

TT: Wayfarers

Mrs. T and I flew to Chicago on Saturday to see the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, a play about which I wrote with the highest possible enthusiasm when it was first seen on Broadway a year ago:

Conor McPherson has given us a Christmas show for the suicidally depressed. "The Seafarer" is one of those capital-I Irish plays whose characters, one of whom (Ciarán Hinds) turns out to be the Divvil Himself, get falling-down drunk, hint broadly that there's more to life than death and spout four- and seven-letter words starting with "f" in rich, peaty brogues. It is also--no fooling--worthy of comparison with the finest work of the young Brian Friel.
Strong words, I know, but the 36-year-old Mr. McPherson has earned them. Like Mr. Letts, he's written a midnight-black comedy, one that wrenches laughter out of the despair of frustrated men whose lives have come to naught. That it takes place in the hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning serves only to deepen the hue of the colors in which their suffering is painted: "You absolutely stink again, do you know that?" "Yeah, happy Christmas to you as well!" Yet in the midst of this world of hurt, Mr. McPherson dares to point to the possibility of hope, even transcendence, and it is this daring that gives his play the stuff of greatness....

SIKESTON.tiff The next morning we departed for Smalltown, U.S.A., by way of St. Louis, where we stopped off at the St. Louis Art Museum to see Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, a remarkable exhibition that Mrs. T missed when it was on display earlier this year at New York's Jewish Museum. (It'll be up in St. Louis through January 11.) To go from The Seafarer to Jackson Pollock to Smalltown in a mere twenty-four hours is quite a trip, culturally speaking, but we're at least as happy here as we were at our previous stops. My family is a close one, and I only got home twice in the year almost past, not nearly often enough to please my mother--or myself, for that matter.

Don't expect to hear much from these parts in the course of the coming week--Mrs. T and I still have a bit of Christmas shopping left to do--but rest assured that all is well down here in the southeast corner of Missouri, where the new millennium looks surprisingly like the old one and everybody I know is glad to see everyone else.

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

TT: Almanac

"I would rather have peace in the world than be President."

Harry S. Truman, Christmas message, Dec. 24, 1948

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

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

tripletsofbelleville%2C0.jpg • I acquired an eleven-year-old nephew when I married Mrs. T, an experience that is giving me a new perspective on the world of art and culture. Ian is old enough to be curious about adult entertainment, so we've been trying to introduce him to a somewhat higher class of movie than he's accustomed to seeing, with mixed but not unpromising results (he liked The Triplets of Belleville but not Shane). A few weeks ago we took him to his first Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, to which he responded with enthusiasm, though we ran into a bit of trouble at intermission when he caught sight of a poster advertising a production of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana. He immediately assumed that it was a play about giant iguanas and demanded that I tell him all about it. "You're not quite ready for that one, buddy," I replied.

In recent months Ian has been taking an interest in classical music, and asked if I could burn him a CD containing some of the pieces he'd heard. He specifically asked for Beethoven's "Für Elise" and the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, Rossini's Barber of Seville and William Tell Overtures, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and Grieg's "Morning" (from Peer Gynt). I told him I'd be happy to oblige, and threw in for good measure the first movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro Overture, Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," Sousa's "The Stars and Stripes Forever," and Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock."

I heard all of these pieces for the first time in elementary school, back in the long-forgotten days of music-appreciation classes, and they made a deep and lasting impression on me, no doubt because of their picturesque qualities. It will be interesting to see whether and how a postmodern child responds to them.

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

TT: So you want to get reviewed

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I'm the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. As I wrote in my "Sightings" column a couple of years ago:

The time has come for American playgoers--and, no less important, arts editors--to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

But suppose you run a company I haven't visited? How might you get me to come see you? Now's the time to start asking that question, because I'm starting to work on my reviewing calendar for the summer of 2009. So here's an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see--along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don't review dinner theater, and it's unusual for me to visit children's theaters. I'm somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule, and I'm strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season... That doesn't apply to summer festivals, but it's rare for me to cover a festival that doesn't put on at least two shows a season.

• ...and most of them have to be serious. I won't put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The Foreigner is your idea of a daring revival, I won't go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven't yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as the Journal's drama critic. Right now Colorado and Texas loom largest, but if you're doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or Montana, I'd be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won't visit an out-of-town company that I've never seen to review a play by an author of whom I've never heard. What I look for is an imaginative mix of revivals of major plays--definitely including comedies--and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I've admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Brooke Berman, Nilo Cruz, Liz Flahive, Horton Foote, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older shows I'd like to review that haven't been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you're doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, The Iceman Cometh, Loot, Man and Superman, On the Town, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit (the play, not the musical), or anything by Jean Anouilh, S.N. Behrman, William Inge, Terence Rattigan, or John Van Druten, kindly drop me a line.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two--especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Almost an Evening or The Little Dog Laughed are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you're not already reading my Journal column, you probably ought to start.)

• I group my shots. It isn't cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don't all have to be in the same city.) If you're the publicist of the Lower Slobbovia Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Matchmaker, your best bet is to point out that TheaterSlobbovia just happens to be doing Ah, Wilderness! that same weekend. Otherwise, I'll probably go to Boston instead.

• Web sites matter--a lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you're doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I'll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can't spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn't mean I won't consider reviewing you--I know appearances can be deceiving--but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season's productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area. Like many people, I now rely on my GPS unit when driving, so it is essential that this page also include the street address of the theater where you perform. Failure to conspicuously display this address is a hanging offense. (I also suggest that you include a list of recommended restaurants and hotels that are close to the theater.)

This is an example of a good company with an unattractive, poorly organized Web site on which much of the above information is hard to find.

This is an example of a good company with an attractive, well-organized Web site on which most of the above information is easy to find.

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don't want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the flood of random press releases. As a result, I no longer recommend that anyone write to me there. I get a lot of spam at my "About Last Night" mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal.

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I've come to see shows solely because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me. Go thou and do likewise.

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

TT: Under wraps

Mrs. T, my mother, and I spent three hours at the mall north of Smalltown doing next-to-last-minute Christmas shopping yesterday afternoon. It's a good thing that we got it all done, because I went outside this morning, put one foot on the pavement, and flew through the air. Smalltown is covered with a sheet of ice. It took me a good five minutes to chip the stuff off our canary-yellow rental car, which looks like Tweety on steroids. Then I drove to the nearest Burger King--very slowly--to collect my e-mail. My MacBook doesn't do dialup, my mother doesn't have a computer, and there doesn't seem to be anyone on her block with a wireless connection off which I can poach.

Our plan is to spend the rest of the day and evening off line, wrapping presents, eating whatever's in the pantry, watching old movies, and being very, very glad to be together.

You do the same, O.K.?

Posted by About Last Night on December 23, 2008 10:37 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat,
And therefore let's be merry.

George Wither, "Poem on Christmas"

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

TT: ...plus a special bonus

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore's "'The Night Before Christmas," recorded at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971:

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

TT: Snapshot...

Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, "The Lord's Bright Blessing" (from Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol):

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

TT: Almanac

Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "A Christmas Carol"

Posted by About Last Night on December 25, 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)
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, 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)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Dividing the Estate * (black comedy, G, far too serious for pre-teens, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• Irving Berlin's White Christmas * (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• My Vaudeville Man! (musical, G, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, not suitable for small children, reviewed here)

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

TT: Almanac

"I never thought of anything but a long full life with my love, but a heavy foreboding hit me about two years into this planned bliss, when he said firmly that we must never go back to the fishing village where we had spent our first Christmas. And a cruel mixture of disbelief and sadness filled me as I came to understand how thoroughly and firmly he stood by his conviction, that if people know real happiness anywhere, they must never expect to find it there again."

M.F.K. Fisher, afterword to The Sophisticated Traveler

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

TT: A year on the road

My drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal consists of a retrospective look at the best shows and performances that I reviewed in 2008. Regular readers of the Journal and this blog will recall the enthusiasm with which I traveled from coast to coast in search of good theater, and it was a pleasure to remember some of the exciting nights that I spent on the aisle--most of them, as it happens, out of town.

Some highlights:

ZOE%20KAZAN.jpg • I chose the amazing Zoe Kazan, who spiced up Broadway with her performances in Come Back, Little Sheba and The Seagull, as the most promising young actor of 2008.

• Itamar Moses, author of Back Back Back and The Four of Us, was my pick for the year's best young playwright.

• For me, the best Broadway shows of the year just past were an easy call: I went for Gypsy and Dividing the Estate.

• Writers' Theatre, based in Glencoe, Illinois, was my pick for America's best drama company in 2008, and its extraordinary revival of William Inge's Picnic was my favorite show of the year.

Read the whole thing here--there's much, much more....

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

TT: Almanac

"No one likes the authority of superior intellect."

Rex Stout, In the Best Families

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

TT: For geeks only (II)

A reader sighted this a pair of super-geeky vanity license plates:

• A 2 BRUTE

• GSAMSA (seen on a VW bug)

Posted by About Last Night on December 29, 2008 8:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Just the least little bit tired

Mrs. T and I spent the whole of Sunday traveling from Smalltown to New York to our place in rural Connecticut. We left point A at six-thirty in the morning and arrived at point C at nine-thirty in the evening. I have two pieces to write between now and Wednesday afternoon, when we hit the road again, so if you don't hear from me until Thursday, which seems not unlikely, have a happy New Year's Eve!

Posted by About Last Night on December 29, 2008 8:15 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel."

Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son, Dec. 26, 1749

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

TT: Almanac

"Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping--rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas--But, goodness, why need they do it?"

John Dos Passos, diary, Dec. 31, 1917

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

TT: Snapshot

Vladimir Horowitz plays his Variations on a Theme from "Carmen" at Carnegie Hall in 1968 for a CBS prime-time special:

(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 December 31, 2008 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Dumber and dumber

The TV was on at my sister-in-law's house last night, so I happened to see the famous-dead-people-of-2008 feature on ABC's World News Tonight. Not surprisingly, Eartha Kitt and Paul Newman (in that order) got the deluxe treatment, which stands to reason (if you want to call it that). What did surprise me was that two of the other names that flashed by on the screen were misspelled: Bobby Fischer came out "Bobby Fisher" and Arthur C. Clarke's last name was shorn of its terminal "e."

I'm an immaculate speller, but I know a number of fair-to-poor spellers who also happen to be intelligent, and I always hasten to remind them that Flannery O'Connor and F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't spell at all. O'Connor once described herself as an "innocent speller," which was putting it mildly. As for Fitzgerald, I discovered in the course of researching The Skeptic that the author of This Side of Paradise misspelled H.L. Mencken's name when he inscribed a copy of the book to the editor of The Smart Set:

As a matter of fact Mr. Menken, I stuck your name in on Page 224 in the last proof--partly I suppose as a vague bootlick and partly because I have since adapted [sic, maybe] a great many of your views....

Be that as it may, the failure of the anonymous staffer who put together World News Tonight's in-memoriam feature to check the proper spellings of the names of those celebrities who died in 2008 says something fairly grim about...well, about something or other.

Mrs. T and I were chatting about the decline and fall of Western civilization while driving from Smalltown to St. Louis the other day, and I offered the following Universal Explanation of everything bad about the world: Most people are stupid. She agreed, reluctantly.

Posted by About Last Night on December 31, 2008 10:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Two of those days

Yesterday I wrote two Wall Street Journal columns back to back, which is something I try never to do unless it's absolutely necessary. Shortly after I finished reading proof on the second column and my upcoming Commentary essay on Alfred Hitchcock, Mrs. T and I hopped in the car, picked up two big bags of Chinese food, and took them to a between-holidays family gathering in Connecticut. That part of the day was fun.

Today we're looking out the window at a snowstorm through which we'll be driving this afternoon, or possibly this evening, en route to an airport hotel in Queens, about which more tomorrow, assuming that we get there. The life of a traveling drama critic is sometimes fun, sometimes wearisome, and not infrequently both.

I just read the following paragraph from a New Republic story about campaign reporters:

CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley has taken to running through a checklist before bed. Every night she travels with the Obama campaign, she orders a wake-up call, sets one regular alarm and one back-up on her cell phone, which she places strategically out of slapping distance across the room. Then she writes down her vitals: What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it? With that, she can drift off before the next day's campaign coverage. Most of the time, though, Crowley is so scared to oversleep that she's awake and waiting, long before the alarm--any one of them--ever rings....

Time was when that would have made me laugh. Now it makes me sigh.

Posted by About Last Night on December 31, 2008 10:38 AM | Permalink