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April 30, 2009

BOOK

Michael Gorra (ed.), The Portable Conrad (Penguin, $18 paper). I blush to admit that I failed to notice when the much-loved old Viking Portable Conrad edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel in 1947 was replaced two years ago by this updated and expanded edition, which covers much of the same ground but adds The Secret Agent. Not only is that a highly significant improvement, but Michael Gorra's introductory essay might just be the best short discussion of Conrad and his work ever to see print. Among other good things, it strikes a perfect balance between aesthetic and political considerations, doing full justice to both sides of the coin (Gorra's comparison of Conrad to Cézanne was so startlingly apposite that it took my breath away). Even if everything in this seven-hundred-page volume is already on your bookshelf--as well it should be--you owe it to yourself to read Gorra's essay, which can also be found here. It's a model of lucidity and concision (TT).

Posted April 30, 10:39 PM

TT: With the greatest of ease

The Broadway season ends today, thus freeing me to head for the hills. This afternoon I hop a plane for Chicago, there to begin my theater-related summer travels. If you're planning to see TimeLine Theater Company's production of Alan Bennett's The History Boys on Friday or Remy Bumppo's revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times on Saturday, look for me in the audience. I'll be there, assuming I don't catch swine flu en route.

In between shows I plan to hang out with Our Girl, chow down on some encased meats at Hot Doug's, and stop by the Buckminster Fuller retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Otherwise I'm going to do as little as possible. I'm staying in a nice hotel, I haven't finished correcting the page proofs for Pops, and I don't feel any pressing need to cram my waking hours with hyperactivity.

More as (or, more likely, after) it happens.

P.S. My drugstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is out of hand sanitizer and face masks. It'll be interesting to see how crowded--or not--my flight is.

Posted April 30, 12:00 AM

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)
• Exit the King * (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, reviewed here)
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone (drama, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)
• The Norman Conquests (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, extended through June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)

Posted April 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair."

Eugène Ionesco (quoted in the International Herald Tribune, June 17, 1988)

Posted April 30, 12:00 AM

April 29, 2009

TT: Eugene O'Neill, master of mirth

Because so many shows are opening on Broadway in the final week of the current season, I'm filing two separate drama columns for this week's Wall Street Journal. Today I write about Desire Under the Elms and The Philanthropist, the first of which is horrible and the second lackluster. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Was Eugene O'Neill really a great playwright? Nobody was asking that question when he died in 1953, but nowadays his greatness tends to be asserted by critics rather than demonstrated by actors: O'Neill's work is no longer seen on Broadway with any regularity, and most of the plays that made him famous in the '20s are rarely done elsewhere. Robert Falls' revival of "Desire Under the Elms," O'Neill's 1924 tragedy about an aging farmer (Brian Dennehy) whose nubile young wife (Carla Gugino) lusts after her angry young stepson (Pablo Schreiber), marks the first time that this once-shocking, now-dated play has been performed on Broadway since 1952. I wish I could say it was worth the wait, but the play is silly and the staging comprehensively ludicrous, Ms. Gugino's steam-heated performance notwithstanding.

Connoisseurs of unintentional comedy, on the other hand, will find much to like about Mr. Falls' production, which has just transferred to Broadway after an inexplicably successful run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Imagine "Tobacco Road" set in a rock quarry and you'll get the idea. The evening begins with a tableau in which two knuckle-dragging idiots (Boris McGiver and Daniel Stewart Sherman) slaughter a jumbo rubber hog and extract its internal organs one by one, accompanied by thunderous electronic music. The idiots in question turn out to be Mr. Schreiber's half-brothers, who live with him and their father in a two-story house that flies into the air at random intervals. Other pieces of furniture, including a stove, a kitchen table and a brass bed, appear and disappear no less randomly through trap doors....

Ms. Gugino, a vibrant and compelling TV and film actress who has had the misfortune to appear in two bad plays in a row, "After the Fall" and "Suddenly Last Summer," is now three for three. Here as before, she manages to slice through the surrounding stupidity and give a performance that leaves no doubt of her exceptional gifts, but everything she does is wasted by Mr. Falls, who seems more interested in simulating sexual intercourse onstage than in making the best possible use of a major talent....

Christopher Hampton's "The Philanthropist," written in 1969 and last seen in New York a quarter-century ago, has now been revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company as a vehicle for Matthew Broderick. A postmodern inversion of Molière's "The Misanthrope," it revolves around an unworldly, anagram-spouting professor of philology (Mr. Broderick) whose inability to say a bad word about anybody or anything enrages everyone he meets. At once clever and aimless, "The Philanthropist" can't decide whether to be funny or serious, and never quite manages to be either....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted April 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

An excerpt from Sidney Lumet's 1962 film of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, starring Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards:

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

Posted April 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."

Eugene V. Debs, speech, Sept. 11, 1918

Posted April 29, 12:00 AM

April 28, 2009

TT: The province of Manhattan

Virtually every drama critic in New York, myself included, praised the revival of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests that opened on Broadway last week. One, Richard Zoglin of Time, went so far as to declare that Ayckbourn is "the greatest living English-language playwright" (an exaggeration, but a forgivable one) and complain that his work is rarely seen in America:

For this American fan, following Ayckbourn over the years has been a cycle of hope and frustration. First there's the trip to London to see each new Ayckbourn play...Then the wait, often in vain, for a New York City production (his work turns up more often in regional theaters) or the dismay of seeing it done poorly by American actors.

I'm glad that Zoglin admires Ayckbourn as much as I do. On the other hand, I have more than a little bit of a problem with the parenthetical throwaway in the paragraph I just quoted. For it so happens that Alan Ayckbourn's plays are produced with some frequency by America's regional theaters, a fact of which I'm aware because I'm the only New York-based drama critic who makes a habit of seeking out and reviewing these productions. Indeed, I may be the only New York-based drama critic who knows about them, even though some take place close enough to Manhattan for any critic with a dime's worth of initiative to go and see them.

Zoglin, for instance, said of Ayckbourn's Time of My Life that he'd "never seen it staged (though Chicago's Steppenwolf gave it a try some years back), but it reads like a dream." Well, guess what? Westport Country Playhouse, a well-known Connecticut theater located fifty-one miles from the Broadway house where The Norman Conquests is currently playing, performed Time of My Life last April. I was there, and gave it a rave in The Wall Street Journal. Where, pray tell, was Richard Zoglin--or, for that matter, any of my colleagues save for Anita Gates of the New York Times?

I haven't read each and every review of The Norman Conquests that ran on Friday, but so far as I know, I'm the only critic who made a point of mentioning that this production was not the first American revival of Ayckbourn's trilogy since it was last seen on Broadway in 1975. What's more, I know for a fact that I'm the only one of my brethren who reviewed the last revival, which was given by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater a year and a half ago and was exactly comparable in quality to Matthew Warchus' Broadway staging.

Why am I going on about this? Partly because I'm proud of the exhaustingly hard work that I put into covering American regional theater, but mostly because it disturbs me that The Wall Street Journal is the only national general-interest publication that bothers to cover plays outside the New York area with any regularity. Yes, the Broadway transfer of the Old Vic revival of The Norman Conquests is big news, and I strongly recommend that everyone reading these words go and see all three installments. But it's also big news that the Milwaukee Repertory Theater has already revived The Norman Conquests, not just once but twice--and the biggest news of all is that equally great revivals of equally great plays are taking place from coast to coast, not once in a while but week after week.

That's the stop-press news about American theater. You don't have to go to New York to see first-rate shows. You can see them in the place where you live, or in a city not too far from your home town--but save on the rarest of occasions, you can't read about them in Time or Newsweek or the New York Times. You've got to pick up a copy of the Friday Journal and see where I went last week. This summer I'll be seeing shows in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. I expect that many of these shows will be very, very good. I also expect that I'll be the only out-of-town critic covering most of them.

It embarrasses me to say it, but most American drama criticism is provincial, and New York City is every bit as provincial in that regard as the smallest town in America. I'd like to see that change. Sure, I'm fiercely proud to be America's drama critic, and no less proud that The Wall Street Journal is willing to put up the money to send me all over the country in search of great theater. Without that commitment, I couldn't do what I do. Still, I'd much rather be one of a dozen traveling critics--and until somebody joins me out on the road, I'll continue to be embarrassed for my benighted profession, which operates on the mistaken assumption that if it doesn't happen in New York or London, it isn't happening.

Posted April 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing."

Eugène Delacroix, journal entry, Feb. 25, 1852

Posted April 28, 12:00 AM

April 27, 2009

TT: So you want to get reviewed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two--especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them or reasons to be pretty are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you're not already reading my Journal column, you probably ought to start.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally:

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

UPDATE: I'm not the only theater blogger with a bee in his bonnet when it comes to badly designed Web sites.

Posted April 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"All art is at once surface and symbol.

"Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

"Those who read the symbol do so at their peril."

Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891 version)

Posted April 27, 12:00 AM

April 24, 2009

CAAF: Loose notes

Male character: "Worried about your book?"

Female character: "Oh, there's my book, the war, the laundry, things I said 15 years ago, the environment, my double chin, unanswered mail, what an ass I am, what a dirty house we have -- and I've had 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' playing in my head for days."

Lynda Barry, What It Is

Posted April 24, 2:24 PM

CAAF: Follow Friday

Speaking of character-limited prose, two Twittery things I'm enjoying: Poetry magazine's Twitter feed washes up some beautiful, oddly satisfying pieces of poetry flotsam (all of which are more successful metaphorically than I'm being here) and Baby Trotsky, a "Twitterary magazine" that's new but off to an interesting start.

A while back, Lowell* asked me if people write poems on Twitter, and we postulated the emergence of a new poetic form that would resemble a 140-character haiku: the Twitterku. It's nice to see this same idea cropping up elsewhere. My most recent favorite arrived via Rebecca Skloot's feed: "Book tour haiku: O! To step off a plane / And see your name lovingly / Misspelled on a sign!"

* He's anti-Twitter, pro-cuneiform.

Posted April 24, 2:10 PM

CAAF: Other people's status updates

My friend A. Flurry's: "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Supercuts to be shorn?"

Posted April 24, 1:36 PM

TT: Laugh and the world cries with you

It never occurred to me when I saw the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's production of The Norman Conquests in 2007 that I'd get a second chance to see and review Alan Ayckbourn's rarely performed comic triptych. Life is full of surprises! In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway revival of The Norman Conquests and the New York transfer of the Donmar Warehouse's production of Mary Stuart. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Alan Ayckbourn writes funny plays about sad people. It's an unsettling combination, which may explain why England's most popular and prolific playwright isn't as well known in this country as he ought to be--but if anything can put Mr. Ayckbourn at the center of our theatrical map, it'll be the Old Vic's razor-sharp revival of "The Norman Conquests," which has come to Broadway after a triumphant London run. This 1973 triptych of plays about the travails of a suburban family is one of the 20th century's comic masterpieces, and the Old Vic's production is as good a staging as you're likely to see in your lifetime.

"The Norman Conquests" has only been presented once in its entirety in America since it was last mounted on Broadway in 1975. The reason for this is self-evident: It's a hugely complicated undertaking. The three interlocking plays of which "The Norman Conquests" is comprised take place during the same period of time--a single weekend--and feature the same six characters, but are set in different parts of the same house. Mr. Ayckbourn, who specializes in this kind of theatrical trickery, has written "Table Manners," "Living Together" and "Round and Round the Garden" in such a way that each play makes sense when seen on its own. Watch all three, though, and you get the full picture in all its proliferating chaos: Norman (Stephen Mangan), who is married to Ruth (Amelia Bullmore), is simultaneously having an affair with Annie (Jessica Hynes), Ruth's younger sister, and trying to seduce Sarah (Amanda Root), the wife of Reg (Paul Ritter), the brother of Annie and Ruth. Got that? Now stir in Character No. 6, a good-hearted but thick-witted veterinarian (Ben Miles) who longs in vain for Annie, and the three parts of "The Norman Conquests" are off and running.

What makes "The Norman Conquests" more than a farcical romp is the slate-gray background of disappointment against which the characters do their frenzied dance of misbegotten love....

Matthew Warchus is well aware of the bleak undertones of "The Norman Conquests." He went so far in a recent interview as to claim that he'd directed the triptych "as if it's Chekhov." I wouldn't go quite as far as that: Mr. Warchus is a master of physical comedy, and each installment is full of the same knockabout antics that can be seen in his production of "God of Carnage." But he also understands the delicate art of silence, and "The Norman Conquests" is no less full of moments when the laughter dies away and all you can hear is the keening sound of sorrow....

Speaking of British imports, the Donmar Warehouse's acclaimed production of "Mary Stuart" has also moved to Broadway for a limited run whose snob appeal will doubtless be considerable. Peter Oswald's new English-language adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's 1800 verse play about the bloody quarrel between Mary, Queen of Scots (Janet McTeer) and Elizabeth I (Harriet Walter) is cut to the bone, slightly modernized and mostly stripped of poetry. A prosy "Mary Stuart" would seem to be a contradiction in terms, but Ms. McTeer, Ms. Walter and their supporting cast conduct themselves as though they were appearing in "Henry V," and the collective effect of their virtuoso performances goes a very long way toward ennobling Mr. Oswald's plain-Jane script....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

This is the opening scene of the first installment of the 1977 ITV television production of The Norman Conquests, directed by Herbert Wise:

Posted April 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Rear-view mirror

The New York Times just ran a story about the controversy arising from the fact that the Broadway revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone was directed by a white man. About time, guys: I wrote about it in my "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal last December.

Heh.

Posted April 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else."

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Posted April 24, 12:00 AM

April 23, 2009

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• I had seen bits and pieces of Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on creative genius quoted various places but until recently hadn't realized it was possible to watch the whole thing online. (Thanks, Quiet Bubble.) If you haven't watched it yet, it's well worth a look and a think. It skates dangerously near "Dance like no one is watching" territory near the close, but I think Gilbert emerges mostly unscathed.

• Courtesy of Jacket Copy, a gallery of some of the wondrous treehouses photographed by Pete Nelson for his book, New Treehouses of the World. O, I need a new dacha!

• New York mag's roundtable discussion of Charlotte Roche's Wetlands isn't suffering a shortage of strong opinions ("a loathsome little turd of a novel"). Even better, Jessa Crispin and Kate Christensen are two of the readers taking part.

Image: Pete Nelson

Posted April 23, 1:47 PM

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)
• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, reviewed here)
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone * (drama, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, extended through May 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)

Posted April 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

Posted April 23, 12:00 AM

April 22, 2009

TT: Snapshot

M.F.K. Fisher talks about her life:

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

Posted April 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Posted April 22, 12:00 AM

April 21, 2009

TT: Take note

Lots of new stuff in the right-hand column. Give it a look when you get a moment.

Posted April 21, 8:14 AM

TT: Countdown

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent me the page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong last week, a few days ahead of schedule. They arrived late on Friday afternoon, meaning that I had fifteen minutes to open the box and take a peek before I had to start getting ready for a Broadway show. I started reading the proofs in earnest as soon as I got home from the theater, but duty called me away again on Saturday morning: I spent the whole day and evening at the press previews of all three installments of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests.

I doubt that anything less than an all-day Ayckbourn marathon would have been capable of distracting me, since I'd been waiting for months to find out what Pops would look like in page proofs. No matter how you think you feel about a book that you've written, your feelings are guaranteed to change when you see your treasured words set in cold type for the first time. All at once the umbilical cord that ties you to your creation is severed and you view the book as it is, not as you imagine it. It's a near-indescribable sensation, a head-spinning mixture of pleasure and fear.

I'm relieved to say that I wasn't disappointed in Pops. I'm sure it helped that the typographical design is elegant and readable, and I'm just as sure that I'll pass through a few more mood swings between now and May 21, my deadline for returning the corrected page proofs to Boston. Nevertheless, I can now say with pretty fair confidence that I like both the looks and (so to speak) the sound of Pops. It reads smoothly, it seems to say everything that I wanted it to say, and the photos are fantastic.

What next? It isn't quite right to say that I'm now scanning the page proofs for typos, because there aren't any. Pops was typeset directly from the copyedited text file that I sent to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a few months ago, which had already been read with extreme care by three Armstrong experts, two of whom knew him personally. Between them, me, and Harcourt's superbly vigilant copyeditor, I very much doubt that any misspelled words have slipped through the cracks. What I'm looking for are other kinds of slips: factual mistakes, errors of interpretation, repeated words and phrases, infelicities of expression. The first of these is by far the most important. In a perfect world, Pops would be devoid of error. I'm sure it isn't, but I've gone to great lengths to get the facts of Louis Armstrong's life absolutely straight--something that none of his previous biographers succeeded in doing--and this is my last chance to uncover any remaining blunders.

As of this morning I've read through the page proofs of Pops twice in a row. So far I've made a dozen or so prose-related adjustments, corrected two or three microscopically small mistakes, and caught one show-stopping goof--a repeated sentence. I also inserted two quotations from a recently published memoir by one of Armstrong's friends that reached me a month ago. I expect that I'll read through the proofs again, but not just yet. I need to let them cool off, which is another way of saying that I need to let myself cool off. This is no time to get nervous and trip over a shoelace. The finish line is in sight.

Posted April 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Posted April 21, 12:00 AM

April 20, 2009

TT: Well deserved

The Pulitzer Prizes for 2009 have been announced, and I'm pleased to report that Lynn Nottage won the drama prize for Ruined, which I praised in The Wall Street Journal:

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. Like "Intimate Apparel" before it, "Ruined" is a plot-driven play that is put together with consummate skill, and its technical neatness adds to its theatrical impact....

My congratulations to an artist whom I admire greatly.

P.S. Be patient with the Pulitzer Web site, which is clearly a bit short on bandwidth.

* * *

Here's a short Voice of America video segment on Ruined:

Posted April 20, 3:21 PM

TINKERING WITH THE IDEAL

"Most artists are perfectly happy to leave well enough alone, secure in the knowledge that they got it right the first time (even if they didn't). On the other hand, revised versions of well-known works of art are quite a bit more common than you might suppose, and it turns out that more than a few great artists were near-compulsive tinkerers..."

Posted April 20, 11:26 AM

TT: Restoration

Spring finally came to Manhattan on Thursday, and I shut my iBook and headed for Central Park. It was the first time that I'd strolled through the park since October, and the occasion, like the weather, was similar: I was headed for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this time to see "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors," an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by one of the artists I love best.

The last time that I wrote at any length about Bonnard was in 2002. I'd just been to see "Bonnard: Early and Late," a splendid show mounted by the Phillips Collection, my favorite museum. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

When some ambitious art professor gets around to writing the history of taste in the 20th century, it will doubtless contain a chapter called "The Mysterious Case of M. Bonnard." Long after his death in 1947, Pierre Bonnard was mostly ignored by critics and all but unknown to the public at large. Like Vlaminck or Vuillard, he was the sort of French painter you bought if you couldn't afford a Monet. It says everything about his postwar reputation that in payment for his cameo appearance in the film "Around the World in 80 Days," Noël Coward was given a small Bonnard as a Christmas present. Flashy, unsound types like Coward reveled in his iridescent magenta-and-yellow palette, but cooler heads thought him not quite...serious.

No wonder. Not only did Bonnard turn his back on the hard austerities of cubism and abstraction, he painted the world around him with a Colette-like sensuality that still makes puritans squirm. "Draw your pleasure--paint your pleasure--express your pleasure strongly," he wrote in a 1935 notebook entry. At the height of the Age of Anxiety, who cared for pleasure?

I, on the other hand, care very much for pleasure, especially when the sun is bright and the air balmy, though there aren't many artists capable of inducing me to stay inside on a day like Thursday. Truth to tell, I'm not sure that Bonnard himself could have brought that trick off were it not for the fact that my Upper West Side apartment is within walking distance of the Met. After putting Saturday's "Sightings" column to bed, I hit the road and stayed on the move for the rest of the day.

I hadn't been to the Met since October, so I divided my time there between the Bonnard show and the modern-art galleries, where I looked in on some old friends and saw some other pieces that were new to me (including a photographic self-portrait of George Bernard Shaw that was given to the Met by Alfred Stieglitz). Once I'd seen my fill, though, I went straight back to Central Park and resumed my rambling.

Nobody who follows this blog with any regularity will need to be told that I was greatly in need of the restorative power of art. It says something about how busy I've been that I nearly missed the Bonnard show (it closed yesterday). Don't think I'm unaware of the monomaniacal quality of my recent postings! Between Pops, The Letter, and my regular duties at the Journal and Commentary, it feels like months since I last had more than an hour or two to myself, and I doubt that Mrs. T and I will have time for anything resembling a real vacation until...oh, maybe January.

That's one of the reasons why I responded so strongly to Bartlett Sher's revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone when I saw it on Broadway two weeks ago: it lifted me out of my seat and took me someplace else. On the way home, I thought of the last paragraph of C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Art's near-magical power to work this mental miracle is the reason why we turn to it in times of stress--yet I'd be lying if I told you that my trip to the Met was the best thing about my day. As much as I love Bonnard, it was Central Park that truly refreshed me on Thursday, the same way it did in the weeks and months following my illness. I didn't fully understand how much the grey weather of the past few weeks had blunted my ability to rejoice in life until it went away and I felt the sunshine on my face. No artist, not even Pierre Bonnard at his most ravishing, can hope to top that.

On Friday Mrs. T joined me in New York. We saw Mary Stuart that night and all three installments of The Norman Conquests the next day. Then we left for Connecticut, where I'm writing these words. I'll be spending most of the week at my desk--I have much to do before the Broadway season ends and I fly to Chicago for the first of my summer reviewing trips--and I'm sure that I'll be frazzled again by the time I return to the Upper West Side on Friday. For the moment, though, my head and heart are full of spring, and I can't imagine being even slightly happier.

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

DVD

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion Collection, out May 19). Peter Yates' near-forgotten 1974 film version of George V. Higgins' harder-than-hardboiled novel about a washed-up small-time Boston hood has finally made it to DVD. Everything about this movie is memorable, but it's Robert Mitchum's performance in the title role that makes The Friends of Eddie Coyle a classic. One of the greatest film actors of the postwar era, Mitchum got even better as he got older, but only two or three the movies that he made in the last quarter-century of his life came close to tapping his immense potential. This is the best of them, a little masterpiece of disillusion that is more than worthy of the man who made Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, and Cape Fear (TT).

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

BOOK

Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History (University of Michigan Press, $26.95 paper). A fascinating, exceptionally well-written study of the origins of American jazz criticism and scholarship, both of which turn out to be rooted in the emergence in the early Thirties of the idea of "authenticity" as a criterion for excellence in jazz. Raeburn, the curator of Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, has probed deeply into the work of the enthusiastic amateur scholars who first sought to document the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans, and his thoughtful account of what they wrought is destined to become one of the standard works in the field (TT).

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

CD

Anne Sofie von Otter Sings Bach (DGG). Arias and ensembles from the B Minor Mass, Magnificat, St. Matthew Passion, and eight cantatas, elegantly sung by the greatest mezzo-soprano of our time (no fooling!) and incisively accompanied by Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Concerto Copenhagen, a fine period-instrument ensemble whose work is inexplicably new to me. It's been quite a few years since I last heard von Otter in person, and I'm glad to report that she still sounds marvelous (TT).

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

PLAY

Joe Turner's Come and Gone (Belasco, 111 W. 44, closes June 14). A magnificent production of one of August Wilson's strongest plays, performed by an ensemble cast devoid of weak links. Bartlett Sher's expressionist-flavored staging breaks with the naturalistic style that has dominated Wilson revivals in recent years, not always to ideal effect--the set is a bit fancy--but never in such a way as to obscure the extraordinary quality of the acting. You'll hate yourself if you miss this one (TT).

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Irritable spring, infuse
Into the burning breast
Your combustible juice.

Allen Tate, "Seasons of the Soul"

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

April 18, 2009

TT: Tinkering with beauty

The extensive changes that Arthur Laurents made in the new Broadway revival of West Side Story (about which I wrote here) have inspired me to write a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal about creative artists who decide to tinker with their early works. Why not leave well enough alone? Was it mere retrospective perfectionism that led Igor Stravinsky to reorchestrate The Firebird and Petrushka--or did he have baser motives? And did Henry James really improve his novels when he revised them for the New York Edition of his collected works? I speculate about all these examples and a few more to boot in today's Journal. Pick up a paper and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

* * *

The prologue from the 1961 film version of West Side Story, choreographed by Jerome Robbins and directed by Robbins and Robert Wise:

Posted April 18, 12:00 AM

April 17, 2009

TT: At long last

The page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong arrived a few minutes ahead of Mrs. T.

This is a great day.

Posted April 17, 5:50 PM

TT: August Wilson's gone and come

I rejoice to report in today's Wall Street Journal drama column that Lincoln Center Theater's Broadway revival of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone is first-rate in every way. Not so, alas, the Broadway transfer of Next to Normal. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Broadway and August Wilson never quite got along. All ten of his plays about black life in 20th-century America were seen there--finally--but their runs were usually short, and Lincoln Center Theater's new production of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is only the second Broadway revival of any of Wilson's plays. That isn't exactly surprising. It's only been in recent years that Broadway producers have started making a concerted attempt to reach out to black audiences, and Wilson's last three plays, "King Hedley II," "Gem of the Ocean" and "Radio Golf," were far less effective than the ones that came before them. But "Joe Turner," which was last seen on Broadway for three months in 1988, is out of his top drawer, and this revival, whose magnificent cast has been directed by Bartlett Sher with uncommon sensitivity, might just manage to break the late playwright's long string of bad luck.

Or not: "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is a long, occasionally knotty play that asks much of its viewers, and Broadway has become an increasingly inhospitable place for serious drama. Nowadays it generally takes a Hollywood star to keep a straight play open, and no one in "Joe Turner" has that kind of drawing power. So let me put it as simply as I can: This is a show you must see. Like David Cromer's Off-Broadway revival of "Our Town," it will remind you of how good live theater can be...

Every August Wilson revival that I've covered in this space in the past few years has been staged in a style best described as smell-the-coffee realism. (The Signature Theatre Company's 2006 Off-Broadway revival of "Two Trains Running" actually had a working coffee pot on stage.) Mr. Sher and Michael Yeargan, his designer, have taken a different tack, situating the action of "Joe Turner" in a stylized, semi-abstract playing space that is meant to underline the play's expressionistic aspect. While I didn't find the décor wholly persuasive--Mr. Yeargan's complicated set has a few too many moving parts--I very much appreciated Mr. Sher's willingness to break with tradition, and his cast clearly appreciates the freshness of his approach....

It took Jimi Hendrix three and a half minutes to tell the world that "manic depression is a frustrating mess." Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey spend two and a half hours saying the same thing in "Next to Normal," a musical about a suburban mother (Alice Ripley) who suffers from a case of bipolar disorder so incapacitating that it has made her suicidal and left her husband (J. Robert Spencer) and daughter (Jennifer Damiano) at the ends of their fast-fraying ropes. The idea isn't unpromising, but Mr. Yorkey's glib book and artless lyrics boil down to an evening-long whine of let-me-tell-you-all-about-how-I-feel narcissism...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted April 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Cure for an obsession: get another one."

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms

Posted April 17, 12:00 AM

April 16, 2009

TT: A word to the wise

I flew the coop earlier this afternoon and strolled across Central Park to see the Bonnard show at the Metropolitan Museum. More on Monday, but since the show closes on Sunday, I'll just say for now that if you're going to be in or near New York City between now and then, you really, really need to see "Bonnard: The Late Interiors." I can't believe I almost missed it!

Make haste.

Posted April 16, 5:26 PM

TT: The moment of truth

I just got the following e-mail from Larry Cooper, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor in Boston who is in charge of the manuscript of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

The proofs just arrived, early by a few days. Where shall I send them? I will wait for your reply.

No, I'm not shaking like a leaf--yet. But ask me again tomorrow....

Posted April 16, 9:20 AM

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)
• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, 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:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes May 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)

Posted April 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Chasing an asymptote

A good biographer will do just about anything to comb snippets of apocrypha out of his book. Fortunately, Louis Armstrong almost always told the truth about himself, but anyone who gets interviewed once or twice a week throughout the second half of his life is likely to streamline some of his favorite stories, and in writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong I did everything I could to track down the earliest possible primary sources for Armstrong's oft-told tales.

Here's one of the best-known ones, told in the trumpeter's own words:

A few weeks before Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. "We was going to play 'Rampart Street Parade,'" he remembered, "and we're discussing what tempo to play it, and I say, 'Why don't you play it not too slow, not too fast, just half fast.' The audience finally picked it up....From then on--couldn't nothing follow it." That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

Everyone familiar with Armstrong's life has heard that story, and I had no particular reason to doubt its veracity. But did Satchmo really, truly toss off that double entendre on live network TV in 1954? The version of the story that I quoted in the original manuscript of Pops is the one that he told an interviewer fourteen years after the fact. Might he have been painting the lily?

While I did manage to establish that Armstrong had in fact appeared on Stage Show on August 21, 1954, I had to take his word for it that he'd really said what he said he said, and that was where I left it--until last week, when I made a discovery that made me jump up and down with glee. Not only was the audio portion of Armstrong's 1954 appearance on Stage Show recorded, but a sound file containing his introduction to "South Rampart Street Parade" has actually been posted on the Web. (To listen to the file on your computer, stop all five of the mp3 files on the page in question, then restart the one marked "Click Here for Louis Armstrong.")

I listened to it with my mouth hanging open. Then I rewrote the last lines of the tenth chapter of Pops accordingly:

A few weeks before Satchmo came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey on which the three musicians played "South Rampart Street Parade" together. "I think we should get together on the tempos there, right?" Armstrong told the brothers on camera. "I'll tell ya whatcha do now. Not too slow, not too fast--just half-fast." The studio audience roared with delight. That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

It's true! It's true!

Posted April 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation."

René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth

Posted April 16, 12:00 AM

April 15, 2009

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

Tonight Maud Newton, Lizzie Skurnick, and Kate Christensen read at Housing Works. As I know Terry and OGIC would agree, it's a dream line-up. The event's been well publicized, and I trust if you're in New York and free this evening you already have plans to be there. But for the rest of us, the ardent but geographically challenged supporters, here's an afternoon coffee break of reading by the three authors to enjoy:

• This week Narrative Magazine is offering an excerpt from Maud's novel-in-progress, "When the Flock Changed," as its Story of the Week. Maud's a dear friend so I know I'll appear biased, but I am sincere in saying it's a must-read.

• Lizzie's book of poems, Check-In, was recently re-issued by Caketrain in an expanded second edition. I have the first edition and it's wonderful, and I need to order the second edition for the 14 new poems and new sexy cover. You can listen to Lizzie read her poem "Grand Central, Track 23" on PBS's Poetry Everywhere website.

• If you're a regular reader of About Last Night, you'll know that we're all three great admirers of Kate Christensen's novels. Her new novel, Trouble, comes out in June, and it sounds amazing. This past weekend she reviewed Arthur Phillips' new novel, The Song Is You, for The New York Times Book Review; it was (I believe) the first piece of critical writing I've read by her, and it was funny and enjoyable to note how directly the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen novel (intelligence, felicity of phrase) translate into the pleasures of reading a Kate Christensen review.

Posted April 15, 1:01 PM

TT: Snapshot

Gary Burton plays an unaccompanied blues solo on vibraharp:

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

Posted April 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning."

B.B. King (quoted in the Sunday Times of London, Nov. 4, 1984)

Posted April 15, 12:00 AM

April 14, 2009

TT: Onlie begetters

One of my closest friends, a writer whom I admire greatly, has dedicated his latest book to me. I was one of the first people to suggest that he write it, and he claims to have profited from my counsel and encouragement. That's nice to know--especially since the finished product turned out to be a first-rate piece of work. (I suppose it would feel uncomfortable to be the dedicatee of a piece of junk!) I received a copy of the uncorrected proofs in the mail the other day, and it was a decidedly strange experience to see "For TERRY TEACHOUT" printed on the fifth page. I've been written about in a couple of memoirs and mentioned in passing in a half-dozen other volumes of various kinds, but never before have I been the dedicatee of a book.

Dedications and inscriptions are serious business for most authors, serious enough that you'd think more would have been written about them. One of the few extended discussions of the practice that comes to mind can be found in The Middle of the Journey, Lionel Trilling's 1947 novel about a left-wing intellectual who survives a near-fatal illness that leaves him full of doubt:

On the flyleaf of Laskell's book was written, "To Nancy and Arthur with my dearest love." When Laskell had written the inscription he had been at first troubled by the thought that it was an excessive sentiment. He had then known the Crooms only two years and he thought that perhaps "dearest love" was too much to express what he felt toward them. He even wondered whether so full an expression of feeling might not be a burden to these young people, a responsibility of emotion that should not be forced on them, it had been the Crooms themselves who had first insisted on the friendship. And Laskell had gone so far as to pick up another copy of the book to write a more measured inscription. But with his pen almost on the new flyleaf, his sense of fact asserted itself--like many men, Laskell thought that written words should be very precise in the expression of one's feeling and he asked himself whether it was not simply and literally true that the Crooms were the people in all the world he loved best. And he had turned the flyleaf and the title page and, on the dedication page, saw the initials E.F. standing alone. He had not been able to put "to the memory of E.F."; nor even "To E.F."--the dedication stood only as her initials. If Elizabeth Fuess had been still alive, he would have written a most affectionate inscription in the Crooms' copy, but not the particular one he had already written. But now there was no Elizabeth, and the simple literal fact was that he gave the best of what love he had to Nancy and Arthur.

The finicky exactitude of that passage strikes me as exceeedingly Trillingesque--especially since the imaginary book in question is a treatise called Theories of Housing!

Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, you only get so many opportunities to pay tribute to loved ones, friends, and colleagues by dedicating a book to them, so I've called my own shots with care. A Terry Teachout Reader is dedicated to Laura Demanski, my best friend, longtime co-blogger, and (in the words of my inscription) "the sister I wanted." The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken is dedicated to Bill Buckley and Joe Epstein, both of whom inspired me in ways too numerous to recount. All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine bears a collective dedication to thirty-one "friends in the second seat" whom I've taken to see Balanchine's ballets over the years.

Pops, needless to say, will be dedicated to Mrs. T, without whom it probably wouldn't have seen print. I met her a few weeks before I fell ill in December of 2005. I don't know that I would have pulled through that crisis had I faced it alone. Instead I fell in love, got well, got married, and acquired in the process a part-time editor with an exceedingly sharp eye. I can't think of anyone more deserving of a dedication, but I promise that it won't be fulsome, much less cute. While I rather like P.G. Wodehouse's dedication of The Heart of a Goof to his daughter Leonora, "without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time," I cringe at such horrors of coyness as the oft-quoted dedication of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey:

As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of the New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.

What could Salinger possibly have been thinking when he penned this wince-making paean? Far better to have kept it simple, the way Evelyn Waugh did when he dedicated Decline and Fall to "Harold Acton, in homage and affection." That's the stuff to give the troops, and I shall endeavor to do likewise.

Posted April 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One's fifties, in principle less acceptable than one's forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardized fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living. The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience on which to draw when forming opinions, distorted or the reverse, at least up to a point his own. After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief."

Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

Posted April 14, 12:00 AM

April 13, 2009

TT: Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am

I just read about a Twitter-based contest in which opera geeks are invited to "tweet" a synopsis of an opera in one hundred and forty characters or less. How could I resist? Here's The Letter in a nutshell:

Adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, confession, trial, hallucination, acquittal, confrontation, disaster, blood, blackout.

Who could ask for anything more?

Posted April 13, 1:17 PM

TT: Across the water

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be the first of my books to be published in England. JR Books, a new publisher specializing in "the arts, history, biography, humour, lifestyle and sport," will be bringing out Pops at the end of November, simultaneous with its publication in this country by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The title over there will be Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong. Jeremy Robson, my British publisher, has just e-mailed me the design for the front cover, which is very different from the American dust jacket but strikes me as wonderfully clean and elegant in its own way.

It's fitting that Pops will be published in England, since the seventh chapter of the book tells the story of Armstrong's 1932 European debut at the Palladium in London:

It is hard to imagine Louis Armstrong sharing a bill with such quintessentially English vaudevillians as Max Miller, the "cheeky chappie" whose loud suits and blue humor were as familiar to his audiences as Armstrong's handkerchiefs and high Cs were to his--but, then, it is as hard for most of us to imagine what the London Palladium was like in 1932, three quarters of a century before it passed into the hands of Andrew Lloyd Webber and became the home of high-tech musical-comedy extravaganzas. Nowadays the Edwardian music hall, with its galloping comic songs, sentimental ballads, and flamboyantly costumed clowns, is known only to viewers of such films as The 39 Steps and The Entertainer. In the Thirties, though, it was still an immensely popular and vital institution, much more so than America's fast-fading vaudeville circuit, and the 2,300-seat Palladium (on whose stage the hapless Mr. Memory is shot dead in the last scene of The 39 Steps) was the city's most celebrated "variety house." In any case Armstrong had nowhere else to go. The British musicians' union was adamantly opposed to letting foreign musicians work in England, and the Ministry of Labour accordingly refused to grant permits allowing the members of American bands to perform in hotels, restaurants, or nightclubs. Alien though its culture was to a black jazzman from New Orleans, the music-hall circuit was the only place where Armstrong could introduce himself to the British public....

The story of Armstrong's first European performances is a fascinating tale that I tell in detail in Pops. Part of what makes it so interesting is that he had never before been written about so extensively in the mainstream press. In America circa 1932 Armstrong was "a second-tier celebrity, worthy of a half-page in Time on a slow news week but not nearly so famous as Bing Crosby, or even Rudy Vallée. His name did not appear in the news columns of the New York Times until 1935, or in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature until 1944." In England, by contrast, he was a big story--and a controversial one.

Why? Read all about it in December!

* * *

Laurence Olivier plays a music-hall comedian in John Osborne's The Entertainer, filmed by Tony Richardson in 1960:

Posted April 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The British public has always had an unerring taste for ungifted amateurs."

John Osborne, BBC-TV, Feb. 18, 1958

Posted April 13, 12:00 AM

April 10, 2009

TT: George Bush? Who he?

It was another lackluster week for New York theater, as I report in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, which contains variably unenthusiastic reviews of Christopher Durang's Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and the Broadway transfer of Rock of Ages. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

What will American playwrights do without George W. Bush to kick around? Judging by Christopher Durang's "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," it would appear--at least for the moment--that they'll simply have to keep on kicking. Mr. Bush, it seems, is the indispensable man of political theater, the all-purpose target without whom no self-respecting progressive, Mr. Durang included, can hope to get through the working day.

To be sure, Mr. Bush is never mentioned by name in "Why Torture Is Wrong," but he is omnipresent all the same, for it is his war on terror that is the highly specific subject of Mr. Durang's scattershot satire. How specific? This specific: "John Yoo from the Justice Department wrote a torture memo that says it isn't torture unless it causes organ failure. And even if it does that, as long as the President says the words 'war on terror,' it's A-okay." In case you didn't notice, that's a joke. "Why Torture Is Wrong" is full of such "jokes," which is one of the reasons why it soon outstays its welcome: Mr. Durang, who is under normal circumstances a very witty man, has made the mistake of letting his anger get the best of him....

"Rock of Ages" is a moderately amusing jukebox musical whose ear-shredding score consists of a compilation of the greater and lesser hits of such noted arena rockers of the '80s as Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Journey, Styx and Twisted Sister, all of which I loathed when I first heard them on the radio a quarter-century ago. It would be the grossest of understatements to say that I expected nothing out of "Rock of Ages," so I'm pleased--sort of--to report that it could have been a whole lot worse....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted April 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilirating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"

Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure

Posted April 10, 12:00 AM

April 9, 2009

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)
• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, 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:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes May 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)

Posted April 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"She had no longer any relish for her once favorite amusement of reading. And mostly she disliked those authors who have penetrated deeply into the intricate paths of vanity in the human mind, for in them her own folly was continually brought to her remembrance and presented to her view."

Sarah Fielding, The History of the Countess of Dellwyn

Posted April 09, 12:00 AM

April 8, 2009

TT: Audible

I'll be appearing today on Soundcheck, WNYC's daily talk show about music, to discuss my recent Wall Street Journal column on booing with John Schaefer, the host, and Ben Zimmer, a linguist who has studied the origins of the custom.

Soundcheck airs each afternoon at two p.m. EDT. You can listen to WNYC via terrestrial radio by tuning to 93.9 FM. Go here for more information on today's episode or to listen live via streaming audio on your computer.

Posted April 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Tex Avery's "King-Size Canary," released in 1947:

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

Posted April 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"'Marriage': this I call the will that moves two to create the one which is more than those who created it."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Posted April 08, 12:00 AM

April 7, 2009

CABARET

Daryl Sherman (Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel, 59 W. 44, Monday nights through April 27). A smart, light-footed songstress whose piping, Mildred Bailey-flavored voice never fails to swing or to please, Sherman is currently appearing on Mondays at the Oak Room, accompanied by James Chirillo on guitar and Boots Maleson on bass. They don't come any hipper (TT).

Posted April 07, 4:41 PM

TT: Up and down, up and down

The page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be sent to me on April 24. At that point I'll have a month to make my final corrections. Then I'll be done--really, really done. It can't happen soon enough. I've read through the manuscript so many times that I've lost my ability to see what's there, save on a word-by-word basis. Sometimes I reread Pops and hug myself with delight, sure that I've penned a masterpiece. Just as often, though, my heart sinks to my shoes and I feel equally sure that I dropped the ball somewhere along the way.

The good news, such as it is, is that I've been a professional author long enough to know that both reactions are predictable, and that neither is meaningful. Manic depression is an inevitable stage in the publication of a book, and I'm there with a vengeance. The only reason why it isn't worse is because I have the July 25 premiere of The Letter to distract me, which is sort of like being distracted from your impending execution by voluntarily submitting to root-canal therapy.

In my saner moments I feel fairly confident that Pops is a solid piece of work, maybe even the best thing that I've done. But Louis Armstrong was a great man, and such birds of paradise deserve far more than the best that a biographer has in him. As I acknowledged in this space a couple of months ago, "there's no such thing as a definitive biography of a great man. There can't be. A great man (or woman) is too big to cram into a book-sized box." On my bad days I look at Pops and see only the things that I wish were better about it, of which there are plenty. On other days I rub my hands together like Wile E. Coyote in "Operation: Rabbit" and imagine myself to be a biographical super-genius:

I read through the manuscript for the umpteenth time on Sunday morning and am once again feeling like Mr. Coyote. Alas, we all know what happened to him...

Posted April 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The same thing has happened in recent history: the French Revolution liberated people from the power of the aristocrats. But the bourgeoisie that took over represented the exploitation of man by man and had to be destroyed--as in the Russian Revolution, which then degenerated into totalitarianism, Stalinism, and genocide. The more you make revolutions, the worse it gets. Man is driven by evil instincts that are often stronger than moral laws."

Eugène Ionesco, interview, The Paris Review, 1984

Posted April 07, 12:00 AM

April 6, 2009

OPINION BORN OF EXPERIENCE

"Nowadays the conflict-of-interest cops would come down hard on any editor who dared to permit a Broadway director to double as a drama critic. So much the worse for journalistic standards! It was precisely because Harold Clurman had worked with people like Inge, Odets, O'Neill, Miller and Williams that he was capable of writing with such lapidary insight about their virtues and flaws..."

Posted April 06, 10:08 AM

TT: A ripping good show

Paul Moravec and I gave our first public presentation on The Letter last Wednesday night at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where my operatic collaborator is wrapping up a two-year term as artist-in-residence. It was a multi-media extravaganza: we played a synthesized version of the first part of the opening scene, having previously kicked things off by showing the trailer for William Wyler's 1940 film of The Letter:

In the second half of the program, Paul accompanied the wonderful mezzo-soprano Rosalie Sullivan in an aria from The Letter, then demonstrated the opera's harmonic language by playing and analyzing excerpts from the score on the piano. For my part, I gave a blow-by-blow synopsis of the action, explaining along the way how we'd changed the Somerset Maugham play on which The Letter is based, and described how I wrote the text of the aria that Rose sang. We then spent a half-hour answering smart questions from the audience.

Many of the people with whom we chatted after the show said that they were surprised by how smoothly Paul and I interacted on stage. They were even more surprised when we told them that our presentation was almost entirely improvised. Truth to tell, I was a bit surprised myself by how easily things went--I prefer to speak from a written-out text--but Paul and I have appeared together so many times that we know how to give an impromptu joint performance that sounds as though it had been rehearsed. Needless to say, it also helps that we've spent countless hours talking to one another about The Letter in the past three years. At any rate, our maiden voyage went off without any visible hitches, and we're looking forward to doing it several more times between now and July 25, when The Letter opens in Santa Fe.

Only one thing went wrong, but it came close to being a show-stopper. Rose and I met at Penn Station that afternoon to catch a train to Princeton Junction. As soon as we sat down, I heard a faint sound that I unwisely ignored. A half-hour later I crossed my legs, felt a draft, looked down, and saw to my horror that I'd somehow contrived to split the inseam of my left trouser leg all the way from knee to crotch, in the process exposing part of a pair of maroon-colored underwear that Mrs. T bought for me last year. Rose, bless her, was kind enough to avert her gaze and refrain from laughing for the rest of the ride.

Not at all to my surprise, Paul was less tactful when he picked Rose and me up at the train station. He hooted all the way to the laundry where I got my pants sewed up, taking care to point out that my mishap reminded him of the following scene from The Pink Panther Strikes Again:

On the other hand, he did know where to get my pants fixed, so I forgave him.

Posted April 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Look to the right

Lots of new stuff in the right-hand column. Take a peek.

Posted April 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Why must the show go on?
The rule is surely not immutable,
It might be wiser and more suitable
Just to close
If you are in the throes
Of personal grief and private woes.
Why stifle a sob
While doing your job
When, if you use your head,
You'd go out and grab
A comfortable cab
And go right home to bed?
Because you're not giving us much fun,
This "Laugh Clown Laugh" routine's been overdone,
Hats off to Show Folks
For smiling when they're blue
But more comme-il-faut folks
Are sick of smiling through,
And if you're out cold,
Too old,
And most of your teeth have gone,
Why must the show go on?

Noël Coward, "Why Must the Show Go On?"

Posted April 06, 12:00 AM

April 4, 2009

GALLERY

Jane Freilicher: Changing Scenes (Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave, up through April 18). New and old work by one of my favorite American modernists, a chronically underrrated painter whose soft-spoken still lifes and landscapes reflect the influence of Pierre Bonnard and the cubists yet remain unmistakably American (TT).

Posted April 04, 10:05 AM

PLAY

Our Town (Barrow Street Theater, 27 Barrow St.). David Cromer's revival of Thornton Wilder's greatest play, which is still going strong two months into its off-Broadway run, is the best show in New York--if not America. Arrestingly and incisively unsentimental, it cuts to the heart of Wilder's familiar tale of a small New England town and makes it as fresh as a news flash. I'm not normally fond of surprise endings, but Cromer has tucked one into this production, and it packs the punch of a bolt of lightning. Do not miss this show for any reason whatsoever (TT).

Posted April 04, 9:56 AM

CD

Blossom Dearie, Four Classic Albums Plus (Avid, two CDs). Readers of my recent tribute to "the hippest person in the world" should hasten to snag this British import, which couples her first three Verve LPs, Blossom Dearie, Give Him the Ooh-La-La, and Once Upon a Summertime, with an ultra-rare instrumental trio album from 1955 that shows why Dearie's crystalline piano playing was as widely admired as her fey, delicately swinging vocals. The three Verve albums are accompanied by Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis or Mundell Lowe on guitar, and Jo Jones or Ed Thigpen on drums, which is maximally cool (TT).

Posted April 04, 9:47 AM

BOOK

Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (Oxford, $55). Part history, part handbook, this staggeringly well-informed study of Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Sid Ramin, and the other virtuoso technicians who scored the classic musicals of the pre-rock era is long overdue. If you read my posting about how The Letter was scored and want to know more about the mysterious process of turning a black-and-white piano part into a full-color orchestration, The Sound of Broadway Music will walk you through the drill with a minimum of technical obfuscation (TT).

Posted April 04, 9:38 AM

NOVEL

Stewart O'Nan, Last Night at the Lobster. I don't know how this tough, no-nonsense 2007 novella about the closing of a suburban chain restaurant got past me, but now that I've finally caught up with it, Stewart O'Nan is going straight to the top of my catch-up list of contemporary novelists. At first glance there doesn't seem to be much to it, but before long you realize that you're reading a deeply serious moral tale whose protagonist, a Red Lobster manager whose marriage is in trouble, is one of the most memorable fictional characters to come to my attention in recent years. Short and wholly to the point, Last Night at the Lobster is a minor masterpiece (TT).

Posted April 04, 9:31 AM

FILM

The Devil and Daniel Webster. William Dieterle's bracingly dark 1941 screen version of Stephen Vincent Benét's once-popular short story about a New England farmer who makes a Faustian bargain isn't exactly forgotten--the Criterion Collection released a deluxe version in 2003--but it's not nearly as well known as it ought to be. The cast, especially Walter Huston and Edward Arnold, is superb, and the atmospheric black-and-white cinematography borders on the miraculous. As for Bernard Herrmann's score, which won him his only Oscar, it's identical in quality to the music he wrote for Citizen Kane in the same year. If you missed this one on TCM the other day, pick up a copy of the DVD and revel in a first-class piece of work (TT).

Posted April 04, 9:29 AM

TT: Bud Shank, R.I.P.

Bud Shank, one of the great alto saxophonists of the cool-jazz era, outlived his fame--but not his talent. I was lucky enough to see one of his last New York appearances, a 2003 gig at the Jazz Standard about which I wrote in this space:

As I listened to Shank cleave the air with his flame-thrower tone and remembered that he was born in 1926, I asked myself, How does he do it? Of course it's possible to play alto saxophone like that when you're that old (I heard Benny Carter play as well--though with less stamina--when he was a decade older), but it's a long, long way from possible to probable. And did that faze Shank? Not in the slightest. He stood up in front of a world-class rhythm section that was lobbing musical hand grenades into the crowd and soloed like a man half his age, if that....

Shank was working up to the end, literally: he finished recording an album the day before he died. Not a bad way to go.

If you don't know Shank's playing, this album is the place to start.

The JazzTimes obituary is here.

* * *

Here's the trailer for Against the Tide, a 2008 documentary about Shank:

Posted April 04, 12:00 AM

April 3, 2009

TT: Men behaving badly (and predictably)

I crammed four shows into today's Wall Street Journal drama column, a feat of compression made possible by the fact that I didn't like any of them. I reviewed reasons to be pretty, Happiness, Irena's Vow, and Hair. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Neil LaBute, Off-Broadway's most prolific playwright, has finally made it uptown. "reasons to be pretty" (the absence of capitalization is the author's inexplicable affectation) is now playing on Broadway after a successful run at MCC Theater. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it does as well this time around, for what we have here is a kinder, gentler Neil LaBute, one who lets his hapless protagonist part way off the hook instead of letting him twist and turn all night long. That's what makes "reasons to be pretty" suitable for uptown consumption. It's Mr. LaBute's first semi-optimistic play--which turns out not to be a good thing....

"reasons to be pretty" is standard-issue LaBute, a fast-paced sequence of ante-upping scenes in which the men are pigs, the women are victims and everyone (including the women) talks dirty. If you've never seen any of Mr. LaBute's plays, you might well find this one fresh, but this is the sixth one I've reviewed, and I'm sorry to say that his style has hardened into a set of tricks and mannerisms that he uses to say the same things over and over again....

Susan Stroman and John Weidman, who last collaborated nine years ago on "Contact," have reunited for "Happiness," a musical inspired by "Outward Bound," Sutton Vane's 1923 play about a group of travelers on an ocean liner who discover that they are (A) dead and (B) en route to their Final Destination. Mr. Weidman, who wrote the book, has changed the setting to modern-day Manhattan and the ocean liner to a subway car, in the process inserting every theatrical cliché and social, sexual, ethnic and political stereotype known to man...

Dan Gordon has performed a feat of upside-down alchemy with "Irena's Vow": He's taken the true story of a Polish Catholic girl (Tovah Feldshuh) who saved the lives of 11 Jews by hiding them in the cellar of a Nazi major (Thomas Ryan) and turned it into an egrgeiously sappy piece of what can only be called Holocaust kitsch....

The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park revival of "Hair" has moved to Broadway, restaged and recast but identical in spirit to the outdoor version that I saw in Central Park last August. The direction and choreography, by Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage, are as festive as ever, and the onstage band is still lava-hot, especially Bernard Purdie on drums. The show itself, alas, is also unchanged: The first act is lively but smug, the second act a hopelessly incoherent mess...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted April 03, 12:00 AM

TT: The critic who got his hands dirty

I recently posted a week's worth of almanac entries drawn from The Collected Works of Harold Clurman, an eleven-hundred-page anthology devoted mainly but by no means exclusively to the drama criticism of a man who is better known as a director. In addition to co-founding the Group Theatre in 1931, Clurman directed the Broadway premieres of Arthur Miller's All My Sons and After the Fall, Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy, William Inge's Bus Stop, Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, and Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet. He was, in short, a first-tier theatrical professional--yet he also spent most of the second of his life doubling as a working drama critic, and his reviews, as I discovered when I read them in bulk last week, are as fresh and instructive today as they were when they were originally published in The New Republic and The Nation between 1948 and Clurman's death in 1980.

Needless to say, no reputable magazine or newspaper would now allow Clurman to write drama reviews while simultaneously working as a Broadway director. Is arts journalism in America better off as a result of this change in ethical standards? I very much doubt it--and thereby hangs a "Sightings" column. In Saturday's Wall Street Journal I take a closer look at Clurman's criticism. What made it so good? To find out, pick up a paper on Saturday and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Yes, I know, Clurman produced Miller's All My Sons, he didn't direct it. Elia Kazan did, and he also staged After the Fall (Clurman was involved with the first production, but in a different capacity). My mistake--I had a fit of absentmindedness. These things happen, arrgh.

* * *

Harold Clurman talks about the state of American theater in the Seventies:

Posted April 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic."

Raymond Chandler, letter to Frederick Lewis Allen (May 7, 1948)

Posted April 03, 12:00 AM

April 2, 2009

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)
• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, 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:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes May 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WARREN, R.I.:
• The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted April 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater."

Robertson Davies, A Voice in the Attic

Posted April 02, 12:00 AM

April 1, 2009

COME BACK, WILLIAM INGE

"A half-century ago, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were universally reckoned the finest American dramatists of the postwar era. They still are. In 1959, however, the short list also included William Inge, and there were those who ranked Inge higher than either of his contemporaries. He was certainly more successful than Miller or Williams, both of whom already had notably uneven track records on Broadway..."

Posted April 01, 8:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Sir Thomas Beecham rehearsing the Royal Philharmonic in the ballet music from Gounod's Faust in 1958:

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

Posted April 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained."

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Posted April 01, 12:00 AM