About Last Night: February 2009 Archives

THEY DON'T DO WAGNER

"I do think it fitting that there should be one place in the world where Wagner's music is not played in public solely because of the hateful ideas of the man who wrote it..."

Posted by About Last Night on February 1, 2009 10:06 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the buildings. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and sharpening and silencing--everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Posted by About Last Night on February 2, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Coast to coast to coast (VI)

JANUARY 25 "The Journal pays me to fly on airplanes, not to see shows," I told my niece after we'd seen Kansas City Rep's production of The Glass Menagerie. I was, of course, exaggerating the least little bit: I've seen more than my share of shows for which The Wall Street Journal didn't pay me nearly enough to sit through. The Glass Menagerie, however, wasn't one of them, as my review made eminently clear.

PORTER%20THE%20MIRROR.jpg As for my visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, it was pure gravy, not least because I got to see my favorite Fairfield Porter painting, "The Mirror," a masterpiece that has been hung in the museum's new contemporary-art wing, right where it belongs. I'm no longer allowed to write about Porter in the Journal because I own a half-dozen of his color lithographs (the Journal is fussy about conflicts of interest, both real and hypothetical). I did, however, mention him prominently in a lecture called "Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips" that I delivered four years ago at the Phillips Collection:

I own prints by such freely figurative artists as William Bailey, Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver, all of whom are highly compatible with the spirit of the Phillips, as well as an etching by Richard Diebenkorn, whose debt to the Phillips Collection was not unlike my own. To round out the whole, I acquired a pair of prints by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, the quintessential Phillips Collection painters, both of whom had a far-reaching influence on those American modernists who were (so to speak) of but not in the New York School. In 1938, around the time that his more precocious contemporaries were grappling with the problem of abstraction, Fairfield Porter went to an exhibition of paintings by Bonnard and Vuillard. He looked around and said to himself, "Why does one think of doing anything else when it is so natural to do this?" It's a question Duncan Phillips might well have asked himself, too.

WYETH%20BATTLEGROUND.jpg Somebody at the Nelson, by the way, is very smart, for "The Mirror" has been hung side by side with Andrew Wyeth's "Battleground," and the pairing of the two canvases speaks volumes about both artists. I wish I'd seen them together prior to writing my Wyeth column for the Journal.

JANUARY 26 People really are nicer here. Everyone I met at Kansas City International Airport--even the guard who waved me through the metal detector--went well out of his or her way to be friendly and helpful. I hated to say goodbye, but Chicago and Our Girl awaited, and two hours later I was checking into my downtown hotel for a four-night stay in the Windy City, where the traffic is heavy and the weather appalling.

Cymbeline_Review.3.jpg I flew north to see two plays, Chicago Shakespeare's Macbeth and Shattered Globe Theatre's The Little Foxes. In between I wrote and filed a drama column, visited the Art Institute of Chicago, hung out with Our Girl and her friends, and ate a meal with Barbara Gaines, the artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare, whose productions I've been covering once or twice a year since I started reviewing regional theater for the Journal in 2004. I would have liked to work in another play or two, but my February calendar is so full that I wouldn't have had space to write about them in the Journal, and the other show at the top of my list, the Goodman Theatre's revival of Desire Under the Elms, is headed for Broadway in any case. Too many plays, not enough time! Ah, well, I'll be back in the spring....

JANUARY 27 Eric Gibson, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, called to tell me of the death of John Updike. "What city are you in?" he asked. I went blank. "Wait a minute," I said, then looked out the window and saw ice in the river eighteen floors below me. "Chicago," I replied.

I checked my e-mail and found a message from Paul Moravec, my collaborator on The Letter. Says Paul: "I'm told we're in the new Frommer's Santa Fe guide." Say I: "Good God, man, buy a copy!" Instead I searched the text via Amazon, and sure enough, The Letter is on pages 6 and 154. Ubiquity, thy name is us....

SWING%20MUSIC%20%28LOUIS%20ARMSTRONG%29.jpg No shows or deadlines today, so I spent the afternoon at the Art Institute, communing with some much-loved paintings that hadn't been hanging when I brought Mrs. T here last June for her first visit. I sought out and found, among other things, John Twachtman's Icebound, John Singer Sargent's Thistles, and Arthur Dove's "Swing Music (Louis Armstrong)," which I hadn't seen in the flesh since I started work on Pops: The Life of Louis Armstrong. I described it in Pops as "an explosion of jagged red and silver shapes amid a fathomlessly dark landscape--a precise visual evocation of the effect of an Armstrong solo." I'll stand by that.

I also visited Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes, which was a mistake, though not mine: the Art Institute shouldn't be giving space to this show, since Karsh, the Canadian portrait photographer, wasn't a serious artist. His let's-make-an-icon pictures exist to ratify celebrity, not to illuminate character, and their shadowy sameness grows downright silly after you've seen the first dozen or so of them. I'd have to double-check the catalogue to confirm this, but my impression was that not a single one of Karsh's male subjects is shown smiling.

At dinner afterward I told Our Girl that I'd seen the exhibition. "What was it like?" she asked.

"He's the Ansel Adams of humans," I replied.

(To be continued)

Posted by About Last Night on February 2, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Promises to keep

Sikeston, the small town in southeast Missouri where I lived as a boy, has only just begun the process of grappling with the devastation wrought by last week's ice storm. My brother, who spent most of the week helping to maintain order in a community that was cast into darkness by an area-wide power failure, has been checking in with me at regular intervals, telling me stories that would be hard to believe were it not for the news photos that I saw on the Web all week.

POWER%20LINE.jpeg The good news--the best news--is that power was restored on Saturday afternoon to the house where I grew up, and my mother returned there shortly thereafter. My brother turned the heat on and restocked her refrigerator. That was the easy part. It will be a lot harder figuring out what to do with whatever is left of the trees in her yard after the ice has melted.

I fear in particular for the survival of the tree that I described on the last page of the memoir that I wrote in 1991 about growing up in Sikeston:

In the front yard of 713 Hickory Drive is a maple tree that casts a long, cool shadow on summer days. Once it was a slender sapling, held up by wires that led to wooden stakes driven deep in the earth, and I wondered if it would ever grow tall enough for me to climb. It is tall enough now. My niece will soon climb it, and my own unborn children, God willing, will someday climb it too. But for me it will always be the young sapling that stands in front of the house that is my home, in the town that is my home town, in the part of the country where I was born and to which I will always return, frequently and gladly, inevitably and eternally.

Eighteen years have passed since I wrote those words. My niece is in college now, I have no children, and I've no idea what will be left of our poor maple tree by the time I manage to get home to Sikeston again. I'm old enough now to have learned that precious few things in life are inevitable, much less eternal. But the house that I wrote about in City Limits is still my home, just as Sikeston is still my home town, and if there's one thing that's sure as the turning of the earth, it's that I'll be going back there for a visit before too long.

Like the song says, there's no place like home--even when the weather turns bad.

Posted by About Last Night on February 2, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we're sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder than ever. No prostitute ever responded with a quicker spasm of sentiment when our hearts are touched. Nor is there anything new about thievery, lewdness, lying, adultery. What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Posted by About Last Night on February 3, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Coast to coast to coast (VII)

JANUARY 29 "Your life sounds like most people's vacations," a friend told me not long ago. Yeah, well, maybe, but most people don't have to spend hours on end writing in hotel rooms. I hate writing on the road, especially when I'm alone, and today was a writing day in the Windy City.

For some reason I find it easier to write in hotel rooms when Mrs. T is with me, though she doesn't like it any better than I do. "Can't you come out and play?" she always asks, to which I always reply, "If it weren't for the work, we wouldn't be here." Nor do I have any right to complain, since the shows we see are mostly good and we generally manage to work in various other cultural adventures between curtains and deadlines. Nevertheless, it sure would be nice if I were rich and jobless. Nobody ever believes me when I say so, but I wouldn't write if I didn't have to pay the rent.

JANUARY 30 From Chicago to New York, where I picked up a rental car, drove into Manhattan long enough to run by the apartment, pick up the snail mail, and back up my hard drive, after which I headed north to Connecticut and Mrs. T.

JANUARY 31 This was a dark day, as we theater types say, and I spent it at home doing absolutely nothing. To be exact, I slept late, ate three meals, read one-and-one-half Nero Wolfe novels, and watched two old movies on TV.

BadDatesSCO09KSPRA_198.sized.jpg FEBRUARY 1 To Lenox, Massachusetts, for the last leg of the Great Theater Marathon of 2009. Shakespeare & Company's winter show is Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates, a one-woman play starring Elizabeth Aspenlieder, a Shakespeare & Co. regular with a knack for comedy who reminds me of the young Lucille Ball, another pretty woman who liked to make demented-looking faces. I wrote about Aspenlieder in last summer's Wall Street Journal review of The Ladies' Man:

Ms. Aspenlieder is one of the funniest actresses on the East Coast, and I can say no better of her performance as Mme. Suzanne Aubin, a loosely married lady with a widely roving eye, than that it reminded me of my favorite punch line in Joe Orton's "What the Butler Saw": "You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin." I can't recall the last time I laughed so hard as I did at the look of glee that lit up her improbably mobile features when she warned the hapless Mr. Croy that "I zink my hass-boont sus-pecttts!"

FEBRUARY 3 That's all, folks! The marathon is over: Mrs. T and I pack our bags this morning, check out of our beloved Gateways Inn, and return to New York by way of Connecticut. Two shows await us, William H. Macy in Speed-the-Plow and the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of Brian Friel's Aristocrats, followed by Mary Foster Conklin's two-night stand at the Metropolitan Room, which conveniently coincides with my fifty-third birthday. No more out-of-town shows until March, and about time, too.

(Last of seven parts)

Posted by About Last Night on February 3, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Musicals are the only public art form reviewed by ignoramuses. There are very few of them, I can guarantee it, who know anything about music at all."

Stephen Sondheim, interviewed by Frank Rich (Jan. 18, 2009)

Posted by About Last Night on February 4, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Sam Mendes interviews Stephen Sondheim about the genesis of Company:

(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 February 4, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Quiet delight

MOONEY%20QUARTET%201.jpg Of all the countless newspaper and magazine pieces that I've written over the years, one of the most immediately consequential was "Too Cool to Cash In, Favorite of the Few," which appeared in the Sunday New York Times in 1997. It was a posthumous profile of the jazz musician Joe Mooney, who had a brief but potent vogue that I described in the opening paragraphs of the piece:

Time was when famous musicians spoke with awe of Joe Mooney, the blind jazz singer and accordionist from Paterson, N.J., who died in 1975. Frank Sinatra, not a man to toss around superlatives casually, called him ''the best.''
By all rights, the object of such unstinting praise should have been famous himself, and for a little while he almost was. In 1946, Mooney and his quartet, who had been playing nightly in a Paterson bar and grill, lived out the small-time jazz musician's wildest dream: they landed a recording contract with Decca and a weekly radio spot on ABC, were lauded in Time and The New Yorker, and began a 27-week run on 52d Street, where the likes of Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Johnny Mercer came to hear the quartet's soft-spoken, crisply swinging brand of chamber jazz.

It was, alas, too good to be true, for the group that Down Beat magazine had called ''the most exciting musical unit in the U.S. today'' turned out to be too subtle to succeed commercially. Forced to break up the quartet, Mooney moved to Miami, where he spent the next decade and a half making music in comparative obscurity. ''I can't stand to be discovered one more time,'' he told an admirer. Yet he returned to New York in 1963 to try his hand as a solo act, and the same thing happened all over again: star-spangled crowds, glowing reviews and a major-label recording contract, followed by total indifference from the public at large....

That, as I like to say, was a good day's work. When I wrote this piece, none of the Mooney Quartet's 78 recordings was available in any format. Thanks in large part to my well-placed prodding, all of them were transferred two years later to a pair of CDs, Do You Long for Oolong? and Joe Breaks the Ice, both which remain in print and can also be downloaded from iTunes. Around the same time, Mooney's three solo LPs, Lush Life, The Happiness of Joe Mooney, and The Greatness of Joe Mooney, were reissued on CD, the second and third on a single-disc compilation. (I wrote the liner notes for most of these reissues.)

All of these recordings are wonderful, but it was and is the Mooney Quartet that I love best. As I explained in the Times:

The quartet consisted of Mooney on accordion, Andy Fitzgerald on clarinet, Jack Hotop on guitar and Gaetan (Gate) Frega on bass, an unorthodox lineup that produced some of the most distinctive sounds ever heard in small-group jazz. Not only could Mooney make his cumbersome instrument swing, he wrung from it pastel harmonies worthy of Art Tatum, and his intricate bop-flavored head arrangements made endlessly inventive use of Fitzgerald's lithe upper-register playing, Hotop's deft countermelodies and Mr. Frega's springy bass lines.
Mooney sought to please both jazz lovers and ordinary listeners, playing everything from ''Perdido'' and ''Prelude to a Kiss'' to novelty tunes sung in unison by the quartet. Such group vocals had already been made popular by the King Cole Trio, but Mooney gave them a personal stamp by writing sly new original lyrics. (Here is his verse to ''Meet Me at No Special Place'': 'You're just as pretty as a picture/ But wired for sound/ If it wasn't for your big fat mouth/ You'd be fun to have around/ Real great/ I can hardly wait/ I leave you with two words/ Va-cate.) And though he was modest about his own singing, claiming that ''I haven't got a voice, just a delivery,'' it was his gentle, wistful renderings of ballads like ''September Song'' and ''They Say It's Wonderful'' that became the quartet's trademark....

Part of what fascinated me about Mooney was the fact that he had come so close to success, close enough to be written up in a full-page story that ran in Time in 1948: "Bandsmen like Duke Ellington and players from other orchestras dropped in after hours to listen. Not since the wonderful first days of the Benny Goodman quartet had they heard the unit discipline that keeps all four men inside the same melodic scheme, yet leaves each musician free to create a succession of original and often exciting figures."

Yet fame slipped through Mooney's fingers, partly because his music was devoid of mass appeal and partly because he was a genuinely modest man who lacked the iron determination without which it is impossible to make a major career in the arts. I don't doubt that he would have liked to be rich and famous, but it wasn't in the cards, and once he finally realized that, he was content to retire to Florida and spend the rest of his life playing organ in local clubs (and at church each Sunday morning).

MOONEY%20QUARTET%202.jpg I wasn't the first person to try to spread the word about Joe Mooney. In 1989 Gunther Schuller wrote about the Mooney Quartet with great eloquence and penetration in The Swing Era, comparing the group to the Modern Jazz Quartet. Bucky and John Pizzarelli have both performed and recorded his songs. More recently, Tony Bennett spoke warmly of Mooney in his autobiography. But the brief revival of interest in Mooney's work that was triggered by my New York Times article has long since dissipated, and he is scarcely better known today than he was in 1989--or 1949, for that matter.

Mr. JazzWax, who discovered Mooney as a result of my efforts, wrote about him last week in a pair of postings that tell the story of his later career. I commend these excellent postings to your attention. As for the records, I urge you to give them a listen. Mooney isn't for everyone--that was his problem--but if he's for you, you'll know it at once.

* * *

The photographs of the Joe Mooney Quartet reproduced above were taken by Bill Gottlieb at a 1946 Decca recording session. To see other Gottlieb photographs of Mooney and his musicians, go here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 4, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Our neighborhod theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little." The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Posted by About Last Night on February 5, 2009 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)
• 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 Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 15, reviewed here)
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN KANSAS CITY:
THE%20GLASS%20MENAGERIE.jpg • The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, unsuitable for children, closes Feb. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:
• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO:
• Rich and Famous (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on February 5, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

DVD

Alec Guinness: A Film Collection (five discs). Yes, there was far more to Sir Alec than the Ealing Studios comedies he made in the Fifties, but if he'd done nothing other than make Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers, his reputation as a great screen comedian would be absolutely secure. This new boxed set contains good transfers of all four films (plus a lesser effort, The Captain's Paradise) and is a must for anyone who doesn't already own these zany studies of Austerity Britain as seen through the cracked lens of farce. The Ladykilllers is the best of the four, but all are essential and immortal (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on February 5, 2009 2:26 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'Except ye become as little children,' except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, 'ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.' One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again."

Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?

Posted by About Last Night on February 6, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Date with an angel

I'm back in New York--finally--and this week's Wall Street Journal drama column contains the last fruits of my recent coast-to-coast travels. In addition to looking in on William H. Macy's replacement performance in the Broadway revival of Speed-the-Plow, I review Shakespeare & Company's Bad Dates in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Shattered Globe Theatre's The Little Foxes in Chicago. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

How good can a fair play be? Pretty wonderful, actually--if you cast it right. Theresa Rebeck's "Bad Dates," which opened Off Broadway in 2003 and has since become a regional-theater staple, is the story of a ditsy Texas waitress with 600 pairs of shoes who moves to Manhattan, goes on a string of increasingly unsatisfactory dates, falls in with a bunch of Rumanian gangsters and finds love without doing hard time. On paper it's a cleverly written, overly cute one-woman romcom--and soi t remained when I saw Julie White play it at Playwrights Horizons six years ago. But Elizabeth Aspenlieder, a splendid stage comedienne whose zany acting is part of what makes Shakespeare & Company the best theater company in the Berkshires, has miraculously contrived to turn Ms. Rebeck's modest little show into a poignant slice of urban life that also happens to be drop-dead funny.

How does Ms. Aspenlieder pull off this improbable act of theatrical alchemy? By taking the wise advice of Alan Ayckbourn: "Concentrate on the truth of the scene. Let the comedy take care of itself." Unlike Ms. White, who played Haley Walker, Ms. Rebeck's hapless heroine, as a charming caricature, Ms. Aspenlieder makes her as real as a pink slip in December. It's not that she stints on the silliness--nobody pulls a crazier face--but she also takes care to show us the bruised rue behind the punch lines...

Intimacy is one of the most powerful weapons in the theatrical arsenal, as Chicago's Shattered Globe Theatre is demonstrating with its eye-opening production of "The Little Foxes," directed with uncommon finesse by Brandon Bruce.

Lillian Hellman's 1939 play about a greedy family of Southern scoundrels is a well-made melodrama whose characters are so broadly drawn as to border on the operatic (Marc Blitzstein actually turned it into an opera, "Regina," in 1949). It's hard to perform "The Little Foxes" any other way in a Broadway-sized house, but Shattered Globe is mounting it in a black-box theater small enough to make it possible for the members of the ensemble cast to underplay their roles, and the results are revelatory. Linda Reiter is bracingly cold and flinty as Regina, the stone-hearted sister who'll stop at nothing whatsoever to get what she wants. As for Kevin Kenneally, who plays Ben, the brains of the Hubbard family, his silken performance is a study of malice so sharply etched that you'll shiver every time he smiles....

Anyone who doubts that William H. Macy is one of the foremost character actors of his generation should pay a visit to the Broadway theater where he is currently appearing in David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow." When Jeremy Piven dropped out of the show a few weeks ago, claiming to have been laid low by excessive consumption of sushi, it looked like curtains for the 20th-anniversary revival of Mr. Mamet's three-person play about life among the vultures of Hollywood. But Mr. Macy, who has known Mr. Mamet since the world was young, nobly saved the day by stepping in and giving a substitute performance so rich and complex that it adds a whole new layer of meaning to an already fine play....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Here are two scenes from Shattered Globe Theatre's production of The Little Foxes:

Posted by About Last Night on February 6, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Fifty-three and counting

BUGS%27%20BIRTHDAY.tiff Mrs. T and I had dinner last night with a long-lost friend whom I hadn't seen for twelve years, after which the three of us went to the Irish Repertory Theater to see Brian Friel's Aristocrats. Then we returned home and went to bed, and when I woke up this morning I was fifty-three years old. Regular readers of this blog will scarcely need to be reminded that there was a time when I didn't expect to live to see this day, or any others--but I got married, wrote an opera, and finished a biography instead of dying. Not bad for one lifetime.

It was at the Irish Rep that I saw the first play I reviewed after I got out of the hospital three years ago. After last night's performance of Aristocrats, an artist whom I admire greatly paid me a compliment that made me blush, the kind that you spend the rest of your life remembering on days when nothing goes right. "I'm glad I was able to say those things to you in this theater," she added. I wish I'd had the wit to reply that I was glad I'd lived to hear her say them.

The truth is that I'm glad for each and every minute of the past three years, good and bad alike. I cannot begin to list the things for which I'm grateful. That Mrs. T heads the list goes without saying, but for everyone out there who suspects that you're on my list as well, I have no doubt that you're right.

Thank you, dear friends.

Posted by About Last Night on February 6, 2009 7:00 AM | Permalink

TT: James Whitmore, R.I.P.

The obituaries for James Whitmore had much to say about his many films, which makes sense, since they will be what most people remember best. From The Asphalt Jungle to The Shawshank Redemption, Whitmore was always a vivid and welcome presence on screen, though rarely if ever the star of the show, as he was on stage in the deservedly popular one-man plays in which he impersonated Will Rogers, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

I wrote about Whitmore in a different capacity in The Wall Street Journal, for I had the great privilege of seeing him as Sheridan Whiteside and the Stage Manager in the Peterborough Players' revivals of The Man Who Came to Dinner and Our Town. I turned my review of the first of those two shows into a heartfelt tribute to a remarkable actor:

It's a long, tough part, and I wondered as I drove up to New England whether an 85-year-old actor, however talented, could possibly summon up sufficient energy to make it work. I didn't need to worry. Mr. Whitmore sailed through it like a youthful trouper, gleefully nailing each and every punch line to the back wall...
It isn't always enjoyable to watch an actor enjoying himself on stage, so I'm pleased to report that the disciplined fun Mr. Whitmore and his colleagues are having is devoid of self-indulgence. You can tell that they know how good this show is, and their delight is impossible to resist. You can also tell how happy everybody is to be sharing the stage with an old pro. At the end of last Thursday's performance, they went so far as to serenade their beaming star with a curtain-call chorus of Cole Porter's "You're the Top." I'm with them.

Whitmore's performance in Our Town was, if anything, more memorable still, partly because of the circumstances under which I saw it but mostly because he was so good. It didn't make the obituaries, though, because he played the Stage Manager not on Broadway but in a converted barn in a small town in New Hampshire. Would that he had done it in New York City, or in front of a TV camera--but such, after all, is the evanescent nature of live theater, in which artists make miracles that vanish into the air each night, only to be recalled by those who happened to breathe the same air.

Stark Young, America's greatest theater critic, collected some of his reviews in a volume that he called Immortal Shadows. It is my job--and my privilege--to try to confer a pinch of immortality on the performances that I see, be they on Broadway or in New Hampshire. I bless my employers for having seen fit to send me up north two summers in a row to see James Whitmore, and giving me space to write about what I saw.

Posted by About Last Night on February 7, 2009 8:58 AM | Permalink

TT: Blossom Dearie, R.I.P.

41AN1HT1R8L._SL500_AA240_.jpg I once described Blossom Dearie as "the hippest person in the world." It was a forgivable piece of hyperbole, though she was surely one of the strangest creatures in the world, a fey woman with a tiny, childlike voice and a hard-earned reputation for craziness who sang in a style precisely equidistant between jazz and cabaret, accompanying herself on the piano with supreme delicacy and finesse. She was also an exceptionally fine composer whose best songs, "I'm Shadowing You" and "Sweet Surprise" in particular, deserve to be much better known. Her long run at the now-defunct Danny's Skylight Room, which lasted into the twenty-first century, gave those not yet born when the New York cabaret scene was at its height a chance to know something of what it was like.

Her best records were the solo albums she made in the Seventies for Daffodil, her own label, all of which, alas, are now out of print, including Needlepoint Magic, the live album that introduced me to her crystalline way with a song and to which I am listening as I write these words. This compilation of her earlier sides for Verve is almost as good, though, and provides an even clearer sense of her jazz roots, which ran very deep (Miles Davis admired her greatly).

I first heard Blossom sing in 1979, became a fan on the spot, and stayed that way forever after. She was the first cabaret singer I made a point of hearing in person when I moved to New York, and I continued to seek her out from then until 2002, when I caught one of her last live shows and wrote about it in my Washington Post column:

As for Blossom Dearie, who has settled into Danny's Skylight Room for a hyper-extended run, I can do no better than to say of her what Walter Winchell said of the Stork Club: She's the New Yorkiest thing in New York. Her piping, super-sly voice and crystalline pianism haven't changed much in the past four decades--the only difference is that she now brings a sharply sardonic edge to tough-minded songs like "The Ladies Who Lunch"--and if you long for the long-lost days of cabaret at its classiest, you'll find them here.

That brief review sums up part of what Blossom Dearie meant to me: I identified her with New York, the city of my dreams, so much so that I named a cat after her. The cat and I finally made it to New York, but now that Blossom is gone, my dreams will never again be the same.

* * *

Stephen Holden's excellent New York Times obituary is here.

Doug Ramsey's eloquent tribute is here.

Blossom Dearie sings "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" on The Jack Paar Show:

Posted by About Last Night on February 8, 2009 8:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings."

Clifton Fadiman, "On Being Fifty"

Posted by About Last Night on February 9, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Loose notes

"I eventually went up into that little side valley where the rhododendron thickets are and there I sat. I began to read and I read about an hour. Twice rabbits came to within ten feet of me--quivering with nerves--almost ready to drop in nervous breakdown they look when they know something's wrong but not what. I read on 100 pages then was interrupted by a cat. A black and white cat. It sat within fifteen feet of me, on a rock, and began to stare me out--very offensive. When I threw a sod at it, it just flattened and went on staring. I couldn't go on reading--the cat completely disturbing the landscape. It wasn't an interesting wildcat, and while it was there no interesting wild thing would come near, so I moved off and came home, ousted by a cat."

October 1956 letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath, Letters of Ted Hughes

Posted by About Last Night on February 9, 2009 12:30 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Maps of imaginary places

Fair warning: I've been immersed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge-related reading for the past month or so and am spilling over with observations & anecdotes. Buckle up!

In Early Visions, the first of his two-part biography of STC, Richard Holmes gives the genesis of "Kubla Khan," and what it got me thinking about is the ways in which the kingdom described gets mapped and re-mapped as it goes from source material to poem and then to interpretation of the poem.

When he published "Kubla Khan", Coleridge explained in an attached note that its inspiration came from John Purchas's Pilgrimage, a nine-volume anthology of travel stories and folk tales published in 1614 ("Kubla Khan" was written in 1797). Here's the relevant paragraph of the Purchas, which Holmes quotes in full:

In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the midst thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. Here he doth abide in the months of June, July, and August, on the eight and twentieth day whereof, he departeth thence to another place to do sacrifice in this manner: He hath a Herd or Drove of Horses and Mares, about ten thousand, as white as snow; of the milke whereof none may taste, except he be of the blood of Cingis Can. Yea, the Tartars do these beasts great reverence, nor dare any cross their way, or go before them. According to the directions of his Astrologers or Magicians, he on the eight and twentieth day of August aforesaid, spendeth and poureth forth with his owne hands the milke of these Mares in the aire, and on the earth, to give drink to the spirits and Idols which they worship, that they may preserve the men, women, beasts, birds, corne, and other things growing on the earth.

So that was the source. Now read the poem. Then here comes the next layer of imagining of the kingdom, in the mind of the reader/ critic -- in this case, Ted Hughes, whose book of essays Winter Pollen includes a wonderful study of the poem:

Looking at the paradise depicted in what I called the Overture, one gets the impression of a great sphere, or perhaps an ovoid, broader at the bottom.

The 'sunny pleasure dome', with its gardens, woods, and river valley, is at the top. A little below, tucked in somewhat under the dome, beneath a forested overhang, removed from the direct sunlight that falls on the dome but mysteriously open to the moon, a deep fold encloses the sources of the river. These are the upward, outward features, like the hair and splendid brow, with the spiritual eyes, and beneath it the sensuous perhaps rather crude mouth, of an exotic humpty dumpty.

Continue reading "CAAF: Maps of imaginary places" »

Posted by About Last Night on February 9, 2009 12:35 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits

Posted by About Last Night on February 10, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fanny and Sam

If you know anything about Fanny Burney, you probably know that Samuel Johnson was a great admirer of her first novel, Evelina, and that his admiration was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between them. I'm rereading the book for the first time since college and finding it just as disarmingly funny and irrepressible as the first time. Edward A. Bloom, in the introduction to my Oxford World's Classics edition, details the making of the Burney-Johnson friendship:

When eminent figures like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke joined the growing company of Evelina's admirers, Fanny was elated. But no one's approbation meant more to her than that of Dr. Johnson: upon learning that he had read the book, she ran out on to the lawn at Chessington and danced around a mulberry tree. The elderly Johnson was indeed so intrigued by the characters--especially the vulgar ones--that he memorized their scenes and was convulsed with laughter.

The book will do that to you. The vulgar characters in Evelina's circle, especially the perpetually battling Frenchwoman Madame Duval and English Captain Mirvan, are eager to point out each other's vulgarity but, of course, blissfully unaware of their own: "he has no more manners than a bear," Mme. Duval says of the captain; he just laughs at her--and never more than in Letter XVI, when she and her escort M. Du Bois not quite accidentally fall into a mud puddle.

All eyes were then turned to Monsieur Du Bois, whose clothes were in the same miserable plight with those of Madame Duval, and who, wet and shivering, and disconsolate, had crept to the fire.

The Captain laughed yet more heartily; while Mrs. Mirvan, ashamed of his rudeness, repeated her enquiries to Madame Duval; who answered, 'Why, as we were a-coming along, all in the rain, Monsieur Du Bois was so obliging, though I'm sure it was an unlucky obligingness for me, as to lift me up in his arms, to carry me over a place that was ancle-deep in mud; but instead of my being ever the better for it, just as we were in the worst part,--I'm sure I wish we had been fifty miles off,--for, somehow or other, his foot slipt,--at least, I suppose so,--though I can't think how it happened, for I'm no such great weight,--but, however that was, down we both came together, all in the mud; and the more we tried to get up, the more deeper we got covered with the nastiness,--and my new Lyon's negligee, too, quite spoilt!--however, it's well we got up at all, for we might have laid there till now, for aught you cared; for nobody never came near us.'

This recital put the Captain into an extacy; he went from the lady to the gentleman, and from the gentleman to the lady, to enjoy alternately the sight of their distress. He really shouted with pleasure; and, shaking Monsieur Du Bois strenuously by the hand, wished him joy of having touched English ground; and then he held a candle to Madame Duval, that he might have a more complete view of her disaster, declaring repeatedly, that he had never been better pleased in his life.

Posted by About Last Night on February 10, 2009 9:25 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion."

E.B. White, Here Is New York

Posted by About Last Night on February 11, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Ralph Fiennes performs excerpts from Brian Friel's Faith Healer on Broadway in 2006. The production was directed by Jonathan Kent:

(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 February 11, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Those random things

Only for you, Terry:

1. Was named with Laura Petrie in mind.

2. Have never broken a bone, gotten stitches, or had surgery.

3. Was a girl scout, but not long enough to earn any badges.

4. Was the tallest girl in my grade until about age 12 and loved it. A doctor told my parents I would grow up to be 5'9" but I never made it. I'm 5'7" and still disappointed.

5. Favorite song at age 4: "Brand New Key" by Melanie.

6. Poems I know by heart: "Kubla Khan," "To Autumn," "The Tyger," "Spring and Fall, to a Young Child," "Full Fathom Five" from the Tempest.

7. Desperately miss sending and receiving mail through the post office.

8. Don't have a musical bone in my body...

9. ...but can bake a mean cake.

10. Never took a course in philosophy, economics, or psychology...

11. ...but was a crack student in math, testing through the roof, and still wonder what might have been.

12. Flunked my first driving test while pulling out of the parking spot.

13. Wish to travel to Alaska, the Scottish Highlands, and the Canadian Rockies; think beaches are overrated.

14. Look something up in the dictionary most days--in the book, not the Web site.

15. Coffee snob.

16. In a high school writing workshop, submitted an epistolary roman à clef short story that was passed around the entire student population and made its shy author, for a short time, notorious.

17. Worked at the publishing imprint that bought and then rejected Dreams From My Father.

18. First book review assignment ever: a life of River Phoenix.

19. As a child, was approached in a Toronto park to shoot a spot for a television ad promoting the Canadian kids' show The Friendly Giant. Had to say "I like Geoffrey Giraffe" and received a Canadian dollar for my efforts, which my parents still have.

20. Paid $250 a month in rent when I last lived in New York in 1993. Actually, it wasn't rent but lawyers' fees--the tenants were suing the owners at the time.

21. Have read Pride and Prejudice more times than any other book.

22. Was president of student council in 9th grade, before switching to private school and becoming shy.

23. Have checked off every movie I've seen in my copy of Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies.

24. Wish I were a morning person; I love being up in the early morning, once I get over the pain, but rarely get up earlier than I have to.

25. Can never have too many socks. There's no such thing.

Posted by About Last Night on February 11, 2009 1:26 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Two thousand dear ladies. All very careful and diplomatic with one another. Ever so sweet and catty, you know. I can hear that sweet-and-catty sound through the curtain while the house lights are still on. They all applaud with their gloves on, never too hard or too much. They're busier watching each other than the show."

Cyril Ritchard (quoted in Holiday, Sept. 1960)

Posted by About Last Night on February 12, 2009 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)
• 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 Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 15, reviewed here)
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

IN LENOX, MASS:
• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Speed-the-Plow (serious comedy, PG-13/R, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN KANSAS CITY:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, unsuitable for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:
• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, R, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on February 12, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: The dirty two dozen or so

I've resisted doing this list as it pretty much exhausts all my cocktail party ammo -- but for the sake of unity I'll follow Terry and OGIC into the breech. Forgive me if any of this duplicates anything I already have nattered on to you about online or in person.

1. I once rode an elevator with W.S. Merwin after a reading. I was supposed to try to get an interview with him. Choked.

2. My taste in music is an ongoing source of embarrassment to me -- and my stepkids.

3. I love reading in the bath.

4. I like to eat out and before I go to sleep I often lie in bed and re-play really great meals I've had. (My stepdaughter does this too.)

5. My mother is named after the French painter LeBrun.

6. I recently learned that both my (half) sister and I share an affection for the word "haberdashery" and both associate it with our dad.

7. I wish there was a game show devoted to questions about Jane Eyre. Not only because I think I'd do well, but also because it'd be a pleasure to meet all the other contestants.

8. I'm easily agitated by movie violence, especially if there are guns waving around even if they're only there for comic effect (e.g., Return of the Pink Panther). It's a ridiculous and (thus far) un-masterable fear ...

9. ... I do, however, really enjoy well-choreographed fight scenes. A few favorite cinematic/tv ones are Jackie Chan with the wooden shoes in Who Am I?, the T. Rex v. King Kong fight in Peter Jackson's King Kong remake, and the fight between Buffy and Angel at the end of "Becoming" part 2.

10. I was diagnosed as dyslexic as a kid. So was my sister. As adults, we both fetish-ize books and reading. I don't think it's unrelated.

11. My dyslexia was caught early and I became a reading maniac. My favorite way to read as a kid was hanging upside down from the furniture around the house, like a bat. It hurts my back to think about this now.

12. I've flown on the Concorde.

13. My mom is dog crazy. One Christmas a family friend gave her the Christopher Guest movie Best In Show, i.e., the definitive film about dog craziness, as a present. Later, the friend asked my mom what she thought of the movie. My mom answered, "Those were some beautiful dogs."

14. I have trouble with depression and trot around outside a lot to keep it in check. Sometimes this makes me feel like a melancholic dog that needs a lot of walking or gives way to molt.

15. I'm a member of the Unitarian Church in Asheville. My husband Lowell isn't. When I'm behind on my tithing and we have to write a big check to catch up, he says it's like "paying off a bad gambling debt."

16. The minister who married us conducted Carl Sandburg's funeral service in 1967.

17. The first sports event I remember watching with any interest was the 1992 Kentucky-Duke game that ended with the Laettner bucket.

18. I always seem to live in places that start with "A": Appleton, Amherst, Austin, Atlanta, Asheville.

19. Our household's favorite baseball player is Julio Franco, who retired last year. You know those Little League pitchers who are secretly 26 years old? When he was last playing, Julio's age was officially 49 but you knew if they cut him open and counted the rings it'd turn out to be more like 80. I love him for that and for never, ever swinging at a first pitch. It made me sad that there wasn't more hoopla when he retired.

20. When I visit a new city, I like to walk the entire length of -- or as far as I can go -- either north-south or east-west. Not into the suburbs, just to the edges of whatever map I have. Really prolonged, non-destination-oriented walking. Some of my best travel experiences have happened walking this way (Boston, Santiago, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Minneapolis).

21. I love libraries and can get pretty wound up talking about their importance. Short version: God bless librarians and God bless the right to knowledge and beauty.

22. One of my earliest report cards said, "Carrie enjoys talking to [best friend] too much during class time." True -- all through school. Through work. Through life. A terrible habit, but I've been exceptionally fortunate in the friends I've made along the way.

23. I think a lot of life is like an awkward scene out of a Barbara Pym novel. Instance: In college I was going somewhere off-campus and ended up walking beside a guy -- very elegant, fine-boned, blond -- who I often sat next to in Nabokov seminar and who was headed to the same destination. Felt very Cossack-y jostling along beside him. Said, "So, I see you keep falling asleep in class -- HA HA!" and he looked at me, very embarrassed, and said he couldn't help it, he had a condition.

24. Lowell's and my current big, quixotic plan is to figure out how we can live in a bigger city (preferably abroad) for one to three months a year. Preferred spots to start: Boston, Edinburgh or Antwerp.

25. If I played roller derby, my roller derby name would be Steph N. Wolf.

Posted by About Last Night on February 12, 2009 12:30 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The traveller, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited."

Arnold Bennett, journal entry, Oct. 25, 1897

Posted by About Last Night on February 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: You could drive a vagrant crazy

Much has been made in recent weeks of the alleged use by American military interrogators of loud music in order to extract confessions and information from suspected terrorists. Reprieve, a British human-rights group, has launched a campaign aimed at stamping out what it calls "music torture." It has also published a list of music that has reportedly been used in such interrogations. The selections range from AC/DC's "Hell's Bells" to "I Love You," the theme song from Barney & Friends. Most of them, it turns out, are heavy metal or hip-hop, a fact that struck me as worthy of discussion in my Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column.

Why do interrogators prefer heavy metal to Mozart--especially given the fact that recorded classical music is now being used to drive homeless people out of Amtrak stations? And why is music the only art form deemed suitable for torture-related purposes? To find out, 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 February 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Land of nightmares

I'm back in New York and making the theatrical rounds after a long absence. Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is accordingly devoted to three off-Broadway productions, Lynn Nottage's Ruined, the Classic Stage Company's production of Uncle Vanya, and the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of Brian Friel's Aristocrats. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Lynn Nottage writes political plays--or, rather, plays about people whose lives have been touched by politics. This crucial distinction is what makes her a playwright rather than a propagandist, and "Ruined," in which she shows us what things have come to in the bloody, brutal land that dares to call itself the Democratic Republic of Congo, leaves no doubt that the author of "Intimate Apparel" and "Crumbs from the Table of Joy" is one of the best playwrights that we have.

Inspired by Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage," "Ruined" is set in a small-town brothel run by Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona), a ruthless businesswoman who is as hard as nails and as coarse as rock salt. Though her homeland has been reduced to the state of nature by the insane nihilism of Central African politics, she keeps the war of all against all at bay by insisting that her customers check their bullets at the door. To that door comes Sophie (Condola Rashad), a homeless teenager who has been "ruined," meaning that her genitalia have been mutilated by rapists. Unable to prostitute herself, Sophie instead keeps Mama Nadi's books, sings for her supper (very beautifully, too) and dreams of a day when the "bush laws" that have laid waste to her battered flesh will somehow be repealed.

All this is tough and truthful stuff, and it is to Ms. Nottage's infinite credit that she does not present it as an illustrated lecture but instead uses the terrible realities of Congolese life as the raw material of an immensely compelling human drama about the lives and hopes of her characters, each of whom is portrayed not as a political cartoon but as a recognizable person....

Anton Chekhov has been all over town this season. First came the recent Broadway production of "The Seagull," then the Bridge Project's "Cherry Orchard," and now Classic Stage Company's "Uncle Vanya." Like its predecessors, this "Vanya" is a flawed enterprise whose defects arise from what I assume to be a specifically directorial decision: The acting is jarringly contemporary, the décor unabashedly traditional. Denis O'Hare's flip, whiny Vanya could have stepped straight off the set of a Woody Allen movie, while Peter Sarsgaard's blasé Astrov sounds like John Malkovich. Austin Pendleton, the director, is a gifted artist (he wrote "Orson's Shadow") who knows his Chekhov, but I can't see how the performances he's drawn from his equally gifted cast are supposed to hook up with Santo Loquasto's old-fashioned country-house set and Suzy Benzinger's pre-revolutionary costumes....

Not only has Brian Friel adapted several of Chekhov's plays, but he's written one of his own. "Aristocrats" is just the sort of play that the master himself might have penned had he passed his youth in 20th-century Ireland instead of 19th-century Russia. A near-plotless 1979 study of a family whose once-wealthy members have receded into shabby gentility, "Aristocrats" is one of Mr. Friel's most complex portraits of how the Irish grappled with--or tried to ignore--the coming of modernity. That makes the play a natural for the Irish Repertory Theatre, my favorite Off-Broadway company, and Charlotte Moore's staging is an admirably straightforward piece of work that makes its dramatic points with discreet clarity....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Fame sometimes hath created something out of nothing. She hath made whole countries more than nature ever did, especially near the poles, and then hath peopled them likewise with inhabitants of her own invention, pigmies, giants, and amazons: yea, fame is sometimes like unto a mushroom, which Pliny recounts to be the greatest miracle in nature, because growing and having no root, as fame no ground of her reports."

Thomas Fuller, The Holy State

Posted by About Last Night on February 16, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Curiosities (first in an occasional series)

Alexander Woollcott, the kingpin of the Algonquin Round Table, was the real-life model for Sheridan Whiteside, the appallingly ill-mannered central character of The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Waldo Lydecker, the venomously campy critic-boulevardier played by Clifton Webb in Laura. The caricatures, as sometimes happens, outlived the man: Woollcott's writings are no longer read, not even his drama criticism, though in his day he was one of Manhattan's most powerful and influential men on the aisle and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. (The "Shouts and Murmurs" column in the present-day New Yorker was originally created for and written by Woollcott.)

Least of all is Woollcott remembered in his capacity as a radio personality. Yet The Town Crier, the series on which he held forth each week, trumpeting his opinions of everything from new books to celebrated murders, was immensely popular throughout the Thirties, so much so that it figures prominently in both Laura and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Sic transit!

Only one recording of a Town Crier broadcast is known to survive. It originally aired in 1933. You can listen to it here. Woollcott's rambling, nostalgic musings offer a fascinating glimpse into the long-lost middlebrow culture of America in the Thirties.

* * *

Read more about Woollcott's radio career here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 16, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Secret identities

I recently went to a nightclub to hear a musician whom I know and like. The next morning I got an e-mail from my musician friend, who asked whether I'd recognized the woman who waited on me. The waitress, it seemed, was an actress whom I'd praised in my Wall Street Journal drama column on more than one occasion. "I am totally embarrassed," I replied. "It was the context--and I'm not sure I've ever seen her offstage." To which my friend responded as follows:

She didn't mind--she said she preferred that you not see her in her Clark Kent guise. That would be like someone in the business catching me in secretary mode. We all have to do our time in the trenches, don't you know.

I do know, very much so. Many years ago I worked as a teller in a downtown Kansas City bank, a job that allowed me to pay the rent while simultaneously playing jazz and writing concert reviews for the Kansas City Star on the side. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that for some inexplicable reason, the people whom I knew in my "real" life as a writer and musician almost never came into the bank to do business. Had they done so, it would have broken my heart.

I wrote about this experience eight years after it finally came to an end, when my feelings about it were still fresh and raw:

At night I was a writer, on weekends a jazz musician. During the day, though, I was a servant. My nameplate was displayed for the world to see, and strangers, seeing it, called me by my first name. I despised them for their casual familiarity, but I despired myself even more. Once I had been a young man of unlimited promise. My teachers had predicted great things for me. Now I spent my days making change. My promise was running dry, my great expectations turning sour. I was sure I had gone as far as I could go. I expected to spend the rest of my life punching a clock.

So yes, I know how it is--which is one of the reasons why I now spend so much of my middle-aged energy seeking out memorable performances in tiny theaters far from Times Square. I know what Orson Welles meant when he told Peter Bogdanovich that artists "need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves." As long as I live, I'll never forget how much I needed it once upon a time.

Posted by About Last Night on February 16, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Posted by About Last Night on February 17, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The end of the beginning of the end

I spent most of the weekend going through the copyedited manuscript of Pops, my Louis Armstrong biography, a three-inch stack of paper that was bristling with queries. Most were easy enough to fix--I'd inadvertently left a half-dozen books out of my bibliography, for instance--but Barbara Wood, my copyeditor, also spotted a not-inconsiderable number of bigger blunders, including a couple of knotty chronological snarls that proved somewhat more difficult to untangle. Such close reading can make all the difference in the world for a too-busy author, and by the time I'd finished working my way through the manuscript, I was immeasurably relieved to know that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, my publishers, had put me in such good editorial hands.

In addition to responding to Barbara's queries, I made sixty-six inserts of various kinds, many short and to the point but a few quite substantial. Most were based on new source material discovered by myself and other Armstrong scholars after I sent in the manuscript last November. Among other interesting things, Ricky Riccardi, the best of all possible Armstrong bloggers, sent me a CD containing a 1956 Voice of America broadcast in which Armstrong played and talked about forty-nine records by himself, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Bunk Johnson, Joe Oliver, and Jack Teagarden. Some of his remarks were so revealing that I felt I had to make room for them, so I did.

The most significant cache of source material to come to my attention in recent weeks was a thick envelope sent to me by Steven Lasker, a California-based reissue producer and jazz scholar. Much to my amazement and delight, Steven presented me with photocopies of the surviving court papers relating to Armstrong's 1930 arrest in Los Angeles for possession of marijuana, plus a wad of hitherto-unknown newspaper clippings documenting numerous other aspects of Armstrong's nine-month stay in California. As a result of his just-in-timely generosity, I completely rewrote the opening section of the sixth chapter of Pops, and the revised version, thanks entirely to Steven, will be the first fully accurate account of Satchmo's brush with the law to see print.

As for Barbara, I've recognized her contribution to my book by inserting in the acknowledgments a heartfelt reference to "Barbara Wood, the copyeditor of my dreams." Copyeditors, alas, are not fact checkers, a duty that rests on the sagging shoulders of the author, and I was horrified to discover that two potentially embarrassing errors, both of them entirely my fault, had made it all the way to the copyedited manuscript. It turned out that I'd misspelled the last name of Humphrey Lyttelton, the British jazz trumpeter and radio broadcaster, and in the appendix, a list of thirty key recordings by Louis Armstrong, I mistakenly said that "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," my all-time favorite Armstrong record, was cut in 1932 instead of 1933. Yes, I knew better. No, I don't know what I was thinking.

Now that everything is fixed, I'm reading through the book one last time with an eye to continuity and emphasis, and I've also decided to make one last change in the title. After a month-long flirtation with the definite article, I've opted for modesty and made it Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Come Monday I'll box up the manuscript and ship it off to Boston.

I'll be reading the page proofs of Pops a few weeks from now, at which point I can make any further corrections--so long as they're small--that occur to me between now and then. But the contents of the book are now more or less locked in: the version of Pops that I send to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on Monday is for all intents and purposes the one that will see print this fall. The text is written and edited, the photographs chosen, the title set in stone. All that remains is to design the cover and typography and make the index (a painstaking chore that will be done, thank God, by someone else, though I'll check and correct it).

This hat, in other words, is almost finished, though I don't feel quite done with it yet. No wonder! I've been juggling Pops, The Letter, and my day-to-day duties as a drama critic for so long that I've forgotten what it feels like to be doing just one thing at a time, much less to take a week off and do nothing at all.

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't know what to do with myself if I were to take more than a day or two off from my regular routine. As Louis Armstrong said on the Voice of America in 1956:

I figure why should I go out on a vacation, some woods, some place there with a whole lot of people don't even speak my language? I mean, if I go out there they gonna call on me to play now, so I just play every night and stay in shape and make a little loot to boot, and I'm happier.

Needless to say, I went out of my way to shoehorn that quote into Pops, smiling wryly as I did so. I don't have all that much in common with Satchmo, but I find it both amusing and comforting to reflect on that point of contact between our otherwise dissimilar lives.

Posted by About Last Night on February 17, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

A 1961 Ernie Kovacs commercial for Dutch Masters cigars:

(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 February 18, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing."

E.B. White, "Television" (The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 1948)

Posted by About Last Night on February 18, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Talent is not a rare thing. But the will to use it and the technique which gives it form are not so easy to acquire. It takes a good deal of humiliation to make a success, just as it takes a good deal of living to understand why this must be so."

Hal Holbrook, Mark Twain Tonight!: An Actor's Portrait

Posted by About Last Night on February 19, 2009 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)
• 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:
• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, reviewed here)
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 15, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
RUINED%20%28WSJ%29.jpg • Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS:
• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Speed-the-Plow (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on February 19, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: You're ugly, too

This anecdote's been rattling around my head for a while. It's related in Jane Smiley's splendid Penguin Lives study of Charles Dickens. At the time it occurred Dickens was in the planning stages of Little Dorrit--a successful author but feeling increasingly restless in his marriage. He receives a letter from his first love, Maria Beadnell, whom he loved ardently as a young man and who refused him. She is now Mrs. Winter and aged forty-four. His reply is warm and charming. Correspondence flies. She confesses that in the decades since he last saw her she's grown "toothless, fat, old and ugly." He responds that he doesn't believe it.

A meeting is arranged, and as Smiley describes it, "[it] was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative."

It's the letter that Dickens sends after this meeting that I find so horrifying and amusing. Horrifying on Mrs. Winter's behalf--for obvious reasons.* Amusing because it's such a perfect specimen of a writer who's having trouble writing and is in bad temper, on a rampage and behaving badly. Dickens sends it to explain why he must miss a planned engagement:

You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to care about, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. "It is only half an hour"--"It is only an afternoon"--"It is only an evening"--people say to me over and over again--but they don't know that it is impossible to command oneself to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.

I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.

* In one last burst of writerly bad behavior, Dickens went on to write Mrs. Winter into Little Dorrit as the character Flora, who is portrayed as "fat," "foolish" and "flirtatious" albeit ultimately "kindhearted." Poor Mrs. Winter! To her great credit, she seems to have acquitted herself with grace and good humor throughout the entire episode.

Posted by About Last Night on February 19, 2009 12:15 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Any person who is truly observed is interesting, if only because he is unique. What makes Hollywood's characters dull is that they are conventional types who are conventionally observed."

Dwight Macdonald, "Kazanistan, Ingeland and Williams, Tenn." (in On Movies)

Posted by About Last Night on February 20, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Thinking very, very small

In this week's Wall Street Journal drama column, I review two small-scale New York shows, one on Broadway (The Story of My Life) and the second off-off (Itamar Moses' Love/Stories). The first is a bore, the second a treat. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Broadway, like the rest of America, is feeling the financial crunch and looking for ways to weather it. This explains "The Story of My Life," a new musical performed by a cast of two on a single set and accompanied by a nine-piece orchestra. Aside from being inexpensive to mount, "The Story of My Life" is sincere and sentimental, two commodities that have been known to draw a crowd. It's also nicely staged and designed and features a charming star turn by Malcolm Gets, a performer of whom much more should be seen on Broadway. I only wish that all this, or any of it, made "The Story of My Life" worth seeing, but it's an over-earnest dud.

Thomas and Alvin (Will Chase and Mr. Gets), the show's two characters, are best buddies. Thomas is talented and ambitious, Alvin fey and Peter-Pannish. Thomas goes out into the big bad world and becomes a famous writer, while Alvin stays home to run his father's bookstore and nurture what is pretty obviously an unrequited crush on his childhood friend. Thomas loses interest in Alvin, who responds by jumping off a bridge one snowy Christmas eve. Did I mention that Alvin and Thomas are both obsessed with "It's a Wonderful Life"? Alas, no goofy angel shows up to intervene, and Thomas returns home to deliver Alvin's eulogy. At first he finds it impossible to write, but Alvin's ghost spends the evening telling him stories about their childhood, and the funeral takes place on schedule, complete with Heartfelt Tribute by Best Friend.

What we have here, in short, is a namby-pamby variation on "Merrily We Roll Along," and Neil Bartram's songs, which sound like sugar-sprinkled Sondheim, make the family resemblance clearer still. The trouble with Mr. Bartram's score is that it has no edge at all--every song is nostalgic to a fault--and the trouble with Brian Hill's book is that it's static and surprise-free....

LOVE%3ASTORIES.jpg One of the many things that I thought about to keep from nodding off during the second half of "The Story of My Life" was "The Four of Us," Itamar Moses' two-man play about a pair of struggling young writers whose friendship goes sour when one of them becomes successful. Mr. Moses is among the few playwrights who can write interestingly about writers and their work, a subject that is usually dramatic poison, and he's done it again in "Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It)," a program of five related one-act plays that is far better than its coy title.

The two central panels of "Love/Stories," "Authorial Intent" and "Szinhaz," are tales of romance gone wrong in which Mr. Moses plays Stoppard-style narrative tricks on the audience. "Authorial Intent" starts with a breakup scene, followed by a replay of the same scene in which the two characters analyze their lines instead of speaking them ("Objective: Change her mind. Tactic: Insist behavior is not a tactic designed to change her mind"). Then the lights go up and the actors, playing themselves, enact a "real-life" scene in which Character B (Michael Micalizzi) tries to pick up Character A (Laurel Holland) after the show. On paper this may sound too clever for its own good, but on stage it is amazingly effective--and very funny.

Even better is "Szinhaz," in which Istvan Zoltan Andras (Felipe Bonilla), the director of a Russian theater company called "The Slow Death of the Human Soul," takes questions from the audience, speaking through a translator (Maren Langdon) whose English is a bubble or two off plumb: "This company is now of course very much knowed about by peoples, but for very much time it was not knowed, or if it was, it was unliked, and not liked, which is what people were saying in the audiences, and in the critics, and also shouting in the streets at Istvan." At first Mr. Moses plays the scene for laughs, but then he takes an unexpected swerve toward seriousness, and all at once you're holding your breath....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 20, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

BOOK

A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science and Other Writings (Library of America, $40, in stores Mar. 19). This omnibus, edited by Pete Hamill, is very nearly the best single-volume collection of Liebling's domestic writings that could possibly be put together. (His World War II journalism has already been collected here.) It contains The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Press, which between them cover all the bases. The New Yorker never had a better staff writer: Liebling's prose was an exuberant, extroverted alloy of uptown and downtown, more or less what H.L. Mencken might have sounded like had he stuck to reporting instead of switching to the editorial page. If you don't know his work, this is a very, very good place to start (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on February 21, 2009 4:25 PM | Permalink

FOLIO

Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels. I love Kahn's paintings and pastels, in which the utterly distinctive palettes of Bonnard and Mark Rothko are miraculously blended into a no less individual style that wanders fruiltfully from abstraction to representation and back again. I'm embarrassed to admit, though, that I knew nothing of this 2003 volume, which consists of miniature essays by Kahn in which he talks about the real-life settings for a hundred of his canvases and works on paper, until I interviewed the artist last week at his Manhattan studio. It turns out that Kahn is also a marvelously blunt and funny writer with a knack for pungent anecdotage. Rarely has a modern artist written so unpretentiously yet vividly about his art (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on February 21, 2009 4:41 PM | Permalink

CD

Robert Casadesus, George Szell, and the Cleveland Orchestra, Mozart Piano Concertos, K. 467 and 491. French pianism can be superficial, but it can also be irresistibly cool, clear, and limpid. Casadesus filled all three bills, never more fully than on this budget-priced CD. Yes, there are other ways to play Mozart, just as there are those who think that George Szell was a cold fish, but these performances of the C Major and C Minor Piano Concertos seem to me to be as close to definitive as a classical recording can get (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on February 21, 2009 4:50 PM | Permalink

CD

Constant Lambert Conducts Ballet Music (Somm). In addition to being a brilliant critic, a gifted composer, and a provocative personality, Constant Lambert was the best ballet conductor who ever lived. The proof is on this imported CD, which contains the never-before-reissued suite from Sleeping Beauty that he recorded in 1939 shortly after leading the Sadler's Wells Ballet in the first complete production of Tchaikovsky's ballet given outside of Russia. Lambert and the company's pit orchestra perform this nine-movement suite with a breathtaking blend of poise, elegance, and rhythmic lift--exactly what it takes to bring a stageful of dancers to swirling life. Would that Somm had also included the equally rare excerpts from Sleeping Beauty that Lambert recorded with the Covent Garden pit orchestra after World War II, but this recording, coupled here with other ballet suites by Boyce, Meyerbeer, and Rossini, is more than precious enough in its own right (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on February 21, 2009 6:10 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Labels are for the things men make, not for men."

Rex Stout, The Father Hunt

Posted by About Last Night on February 23, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Curiosities (second in an occasional series)

After much searching, I've found what appears to be an authentic copy of the "Edmund Wilson Regrets" card that the celebrated literary critic sent to those who pestered him with unsolicited requests. Here it is:

EDMUND%20WILSON%20REGRETS.jpg

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I own two of the Wilson cards (one of which is framed in my office). The one you have is the older version.

Posted by About Last Night on February 23, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: In a nutshell

Overwork. Burnout. Cold. Later.

P.S. I did manage to update the right-hand column before conking out. Enjoy.

Posted by About Last Night on February 23, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Posted by About Last Night on February 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Apologetically yours

Regular readers of this blog know that I was on the move more or less continuously from the end of December to the beginning of February. During that time I fell behind on answering my e-mail, and the "About Last Night" server discourteously deleted a dozen or so (if not more) of my accumulated messages.

As of today I'm completely caught up on such blogmail as remains in my box. If you haven't heard back from me, it means that the computer ate your message. Forgive me, and please write again!

Posted by About Last Night on February 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: A date with Cassandra

Sniffles or no sniffles, I'm about to hit the road again. On Thursday morning I'll be flying down to Raleigh, North Carolina, to see my beloved Carolina Ballet give the first of five performances of Tempest Fantasy, a ballet choreographed by Robert Weiss in 2006 to the Pulitzer-winning piece of the same name by Paul Moravec, my old friend and operatic collaborator. Paul will be present to take an opening-night bow, and I'll be somewhere in the audience, cheering him on.

From there I'm going still further south. If you should happen to be anywhere near Orlando, Florida, on Saturday afternoon, I'll be giving a lecture at the seventy-fourth annual Winter Park Bach Festival, where Brahms' German Requiem is being performed twice this weekend. The title of my lecture is "Does Classical Music Have a Future?" Among other things, some grim and some hopeful, I'll be talking about The Letter, the opera that Paul and I have written for the Santa Fe Opera, and how it fits into the larger context of what classical musicians must do to reach out to new audiences in the twenty-first century.

I'll be speaking at Rollins College's Tiedke Concert Hall at one p.m. on Saturday. A performance of the German Requiem will take place across the street at Knowles Memorial Chapel immediately afterward.

For more information, go here.

* * *

Last week I spoke to Elizabeth Maupin of the Orlando Sentinel about my Bach Festival lecture. To read her story, go here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You are eighty-four. You have come a long way and you are moving steadily closer to your death. But today you are in Paris--a real birthday treat! Go to the Bois and stay there until sundown. Enjoy the earth that will soon enfold you. Be happy, at least on this day. You know there is an endless coming and going. An endless dance. How can death frighten you?"

Otto Klemperer, notebook entry, May 1969 (quoted in Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times)

Posted by About Last Night on February 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Otto Klemperer and the New Philharmonia perform the opening of the first movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony in 1970:

(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 February 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Showing my hand

Mr. Elegant Variation has posted a list by James Wood of what he regards as the best British and American writing since 1945. The list was drawn up in 1994 and consists in the main of books published prior to 1985 that (in Wood's words) "seemed to me deep and beautiful, which aerate the soul and abrase the conscience." It includes no biographies or plays--he claims to be ignorant of the theater--and, save for certain of George Orwell's articles, no non-literary journalism.

Wood's list contains one hundred and twenty-six books. Rather than shooting at fish or picking at nits, I thought it might be fun and interesting for me to name the sixteen books on Wood's list that would also appear on mine:

W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Collected Poems
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
George Orwell, Collected Essays and Journalism (but not Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
V.S. Pritchett, Complete Essays (but not Complete Stories)
Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (but not The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (but not The Wrong Set)
Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men

I should also mention Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers, a book on the list that I read and liked when it was new but haven't revisited for at least a quarter-century. I've no idea what I'd think of it now.

In several cases Wood chose books by authors for whom I would have picked something different. Here are my alternate choices:

• Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (instead of A Heritage and Its History)

• Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution (instead of Poetry and the Age)

• V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (instead of A House for Mr. Biswas, In a Free State, and The Enigma of Arrival)

• Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour (instead of Brideshead Revisited and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)

And what about the books on my list that aren't on his? Another day, perhaps....

Posted by About Last Night on February 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The countdown begins

My publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has just advised me that the official publication date for Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be December 2, 2009. It is, in other words, a Christmas book, eminently suitable for gift-related purposes.

Mark your calendar!

Posted by About Last Night on February 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time

Posted by About Last Night on February 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Conundrum

Outside of their all being mysteries of one sort of another, what do these books have in common?

Blood on the Bannisters

Excuse My Gat! Gore by the Gallon

The Man with the Missing Toe

Severed Throats

Three Dead on Tuesday

The answer is below the fold.

Continue reading "TT: Conundrum" »

Posted by About Last Night on February 26, 2009 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)
• 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:
• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, extended through Mar. 20, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
LOVE%3ASTORIES%202.jpg • Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, extended through Mar. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)
• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LENOX, MASS:
• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on February 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Two landmarks

Yesterday Andrea Schulz, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, e-mailed me three possible dust-jacket designs for Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. "I am thrilled by these amazing designs, truly exuberant in a way I almost never am when sending this sort of thing," she wrote. "I think they're fabulous, in that way that good designers take you to places you don't expect." I agree--and I very much look forward to posting the finished product.

This morning I'll be sending the copyedited manuscript back to Harcourt, complete with my final changes and next-to-last corrections. I still have to read the page proofs, but the hard editorial work is over: Pops is now officially finished. After that I'll catch a cab to LaGuardia, followed in short order by a plane to Raleigh, North Carolina.

More as it happens....

Posted by About Last Night on February 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Poets, as a class, are business men. Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in fine frenzy, from heaven to earth, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice, you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns."

P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime

Posted by About Last Night on February 27, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: And they could sing, too

I've been reflecting in recent days on Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far... and Richard Rodgers: Command Performance, both of which include rare "demo recordings" in which Sondheim and Rodgers can be heard singing and playing their own songs. Nowadays we take singer-songwriters for granted--they've even started to pop up on Broadway--but very few of the major songwriters of the golden age of American popular song were also known as performers, and Johnny Mercer was the only one to distinguish himself as a professional singer.

On the other hand, a fair number of songwriters active in the Thirties and Forties left behind records of their singing, some of them commercial and others demos that were cut to show other performers how their new songs went. I find these recordings, especially the self-accompanied performances of "Anything Goes" and "You're the Top" made by Cole Porter for Victor in 1935, to be wonderfully illuminating, if not always well sung. (Both recordings are included on this album and can also be downloaded from iTunes.)

All this is the stuff of my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, in which I talk about what recordings by golden-age songwriters can tell us about the men who made them. If you're curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here (and listen to a sound clip of Cole Porter singing "Anything Goes").

Posted by About Last Night on February 27, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The genius of David Cromer

Most of today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to David Cromer's off-Broadway staging of Our Town, followed by a brief report on BAM Harvey's Winter's Tale. The headline tells the story. Here's an excerpt.

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What are the true classics of American theater, the shows that have decisively survived the test of time and now look to be of permanent significance? While I can think of a fair number of plays that are credible candidates for the top-five list, only two, Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," strike me as absolutely inevitable. That David Cromer should have directed both of these plays in close succession might well seem presumptuous, but Mr. Cromer appears to have the imaginative wherewithal to put his stamp on any number of classics. Like the haunting "Glass Menagerie" that he staged in January for Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Mr. Cromer's rethinking of Wilder's 1938 masterpiece, which has opened Off Broadway after a much-praised run in Chicago, is a re-creative landmark, at once arrestingly original and essentially faithful in its approach to the author's well-loved text.

As usual with Mr. Cromer, most of what happens in this production is pretty much what the author had in mind, only more so. Wilder's purpose in writing a play without scenery, as he explained in 1939, was to stimulate "the cooperative imagination of the audience" by offering it a deeper, more poetic realism, one not dependent on the old-fashioned traditions of naturalistic stage design. Accordingly, Mr. Cromer and Michele Spadaro, his set designer, have rebuilt the interior of the Barrow Street Theatre as a three-quarter-round performance space with aisles wide enough to allow the performers to pass among the spectators. (The original Broadway production was performed in a conventional proscenium-stage theater.) The "stage" is the floor, the "set" eight chairs and a pair of wooden tables that look as though they'd been pilfered from the basement of a small-town church. No attempt of any kind is made to suggest the outward appearance of Grover's Corners, the turn-of-the-century New Hampshire village where "Our Town" is set. Even the "costumes" worn by the cast are nondescript modern-day street clothes identical to those worn by the members of the audience.

The result is a performance that doesn't feel like a performance at all. It's as though the actors were simply showing us the play, an illusion underlined by the fact that Mr. Cromer has cast himself as the Stage Manager who narrates "Our Town." He speaks his lines in an unsentimental, utterly matter-of-fact way, thereby giving the impression that he is not playing a character but merely being himself. (I actually saw him strolling through the lobby before Monday's preview, wearing the same outfit that he wears onstage.) Mr. Cromer's seemingly artless anti-acting is central to the effect of this production, in which the wall that separates illusion from reality becomes as porous as the one that separates the actors from their audience....

The Bridge Project, in which London's Old Vic and New York's BAM Harvey Theater are jointly producing a pair of classics directed by Sam Mendes, has now opened the second installment of its inaugural offering, a staging of "The Winter's Tale" that is even more of a mixed bag than "The Cherry Orchard," with which it is playing in repertory. Mr. Mendes and his British-American cast have reconfigured Shakespeare's complex, coincidence-laden play as a semi-modern domestic melodrama whose 19th-century setting sheds no clarifying light on the text, just as the actors, fine though they are, mostly fail to find the music in the verse....

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Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on February 27, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink