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January 31, 2010

BOOK

Posted January 31, 10:03 AM

TT: Yeah, I know, but I've been busy

I finally got around to updating the Top Five and "Out of the Past" modules of the right-hand column after an unfortunate but understandable spell of delinquence. You'll find plenty of new picks there, all of which are guaranteed to wet your aesthetic whistle.

Go! Buy!

Posted January 31, 9:43 AM

MP3

Posted January 31, 9:39 AM

CD

Posted January 31, 9:32 AM

BOOK

Posted January 31, 9:24 AM

CD

Posted January 31, 9:16 AM

BOOK

Posted January 31, 9:07 AM

PLAY

Posted January 31, 8:59 AM

TT: Reminder

I'll be talking with Brian Lamb about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on C-SPAN'S Q & A tonight at eight p.m. ET and eleven p.m. ET, with a replay on Monday at six a.m. ET.

If you're not going to be anywhere near a TV set, you can watch the program on your computer by going here.

Posted January 31, 8:39 AM

January 29, 2010

TT: Miller triumphant, Mosher ascendant

Yeah, I know, I'm the guy who dumped on Arthur Miller when he died, but exceptio probat regulam, as they say, and the new Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge, as I explain in today's Wall Street Journal, is something to shout about. Not so, alas, Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies' new play. Here's an excerpt from my review.

* * *

Theater offers few pleasures so immediate as the joy of watching a show in which absolutely everything works, all the way from the first line to the final curtain. Gregory Mosher's revival of "A View from the Bridge," Arthur Miller's 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront, is that kind of show, a flaw-free production of a well-made melodrama. The play itself isn't even slightly profound, but it is, almost alone in Mr. Miller's oeuvre, largely devoid of pseudo-poetry and wholly to the dramatic point, and Mr. Mosher, who has returned at last to Broadway after a decade-long absence, has staged it with a lean, clean, deceptively soft-spoken intensity that pulls you straight to the edge of your seat and keeps you there until you get up to go home. Fold in the dead-center acting of a first-string cast led by Liev Schreiber and you get a production so hard-hitting that you'll want to see it twice--assuming that you can get tickets, which I very much doubt.

Regular readers of this column will know that I don't have much use for Arthur Miller, but I'm happy to make an exception for "A View from the Bridge," in which he tells the tale of Eddie Carbone (Mr. Schreiber), a middle-aged Italian-American longshoreman who lusts after his young niece (Scarlett Johansson). Unable to sleep with his wife (Jessica Hecht) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie informs on her fiancé (Morgan Spector), an illegal immigrant, then finds himself frozen out by his fellow longshoremen, for whom ratting on a buddy is the ultimate, unforgivable sin....

All this is the stuff of old-fashioned verismo opera--so much so that William Bolcom wrote a highly effective musical version of "A View from the Bridge" a decade ago--but Mr. Mosher and his colleagues have opted for understatement instead of red sauce and garlic, in the process vastly strengthening the punch of the play's bloody climax, a shockingly believable-looking knife fight. It had never occurred to me that you could perform "A View from the Bridge" in a subtle way. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing italicized, nothing blown out of proportion. Instead of being shoved in your face like a pie, the terrible things that happen in the play are simply allowed to happen, the way they do in real life....

I wish I could say something nice about a play that stars Laura Linney, Alicia Silverstone, Eric Bogosian and Brian d'Arcy James. No can do: Donald Margulies' "Time Stands Still" is a predictable piece of middle-of-the-road Pulitzer bait that has nothing to recommend it beyond the cast, Daniel Sullivan's staging and Mr. Beatty's set, all of which are exemplary.

Mr. Margulies, it seems, has reached the decadent stage in a playwright's life when he starts writing plays about writers. In "Brooklyn Boy" he told us how hard it is to be a best-selling novelist. Now we get a play that revolves around a pair of tough yet sensitive journalist-lovers (Ms. Linney and Mr. James) who exchange one-liners in a really cool-looking loft (much obliged, Mr. Beatty) and care about the human race so much that they can't stop covering wars, even though their last visit to Iraq left one of them half-crippled and the other half-crazy....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted January 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"To hell with all this caution! To hell with this 'academic' approach! There are times when nature is dull: change it."

Stanley Cortez (quoted in Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light)

Posted January 29, 12:00 AM

January 28, 2010

TT: J.D. Salinger, R.I.P.

I last wrote about the late author of The Catcher in the Rye in Commentary in 1987:

V.S. Pritchett once described The Way of All Flesh as "one of the time bombs of literature." J.D. Salinger's books have had an equally potent and similarly delayed effect on American culture. The influence of Catcher could be seen as early as the mid-50's, at the height of the first teen-age revolution, when James Dean and Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac were on the mind of every right-thinking American teen. And the earliest children of the baby boom responded with equal fervor a few years later to Salinger's seductive invitation to join what Mary McCarthy has aptly called "the world of insiders." Salinger became their very own author, a hip guru whose Zen-flavored gospel of youthful authenticity and neurotic rebellion was presumably unintelligible to the unfeeling adult world.

All demographic accidents have unforeseen consequences, and one of the most unlikely cultural outcomes of the baby boom has been the survival of Holden Caulfield into the age of Ronald Reagan. That Salinger's work would have an enduring appeal for the baby boomers was predictable. He is, after all, their Glenn Miller. His books, like Mrs. Glass's "consecrated chicken soup," are a kind of literary comfort food for bruised veterans of the Big Chill....

I haven't thought about Salinger, or felt moved to reread any of his work, since then. It will be interesting to see how long his books survive him--and us.

P.S. How strange it is to realize that Salinger and Louis Auchincloss were nearly the same age!

Posted January 28, 3:00 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:
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Parts 1 and 2 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory with third part of cycle, extended through May 8, reviewed here and here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Ernest in Love (musical, G, a bit too complicated for children, closes Feb. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO, ILL.:
• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13/R, violence and very strong language, closes Feb. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Life of Galileo (drama, G, accessible to well-read older teenagers, closes Feb. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Copenhagen (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, reviewed here)

Posted January 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I don't really like actors much--I mean, I like having dinner with them, but working is another matter."

David Lean (quoted in Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor)

Posted January 28, 12:00 AM

January 27, 2010

TT: Louis Auchincloss, R.I.P.

Louis Auchincloss, who has died at the august age of 92, was a novelist whom I admired, albeit with significant reservations. He hit the high C once, with The Rector of Justin. Only one of his other novels, The Embezzler, has anything like the focus and intensity of that excellent book, and it runs a distant second. His other novels are watery by comparison, so much so that it's tempting to call him a man of one book, though in fact he wrote many books, all of them serious and well crafted. Still, it's no mean thing to write one novel of significance, and The Rector of Justin, to my mind, qualifies.

I wrote about him twice, in 1993 and 1995:

Rarely is it possible to single out the stupidest thing ever written about someone, but in the case of Louis Auchincloss, the booby prize undoubtedly goes to a piece published a quarter-century ago in the New York Review of Books. The author, boggling at the undeniable fact that Auchincloss' novels are all about New York's moneyed families, wrote, "I can believe the upper class is human...but fiction seems the wrong medium for the privileged life, which belongs, if anywhere, in the spreads of Country Life or the New York Times society page, or in the moments of awed intrusion that TV likes to purvey." So long, Henry James! Bye-bye, Marcel Proust!...

Auchincloss is worth reading about not only because he is a good writer but also because his life is so perfectly emblematic of the class that writer-director Whit Stillman, in the movie Metropolitan, called the "UHB"--urban haute bourgeoisie. Auchincloss attended Groton School, Yale University and the University of Virginia Law School, put in a couple of years at Sullivan & Cromwell, served with distinction in World War II, returned to New York to find a place in the trusts and estates department of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, married well and lived happily ever after. His only deviation from form was a passion for literature that led him to do something wildly uncharacteristic for a white-shoe lawyer: He became a part-time professional writer.

Auchincloss broke into print two years after the war and since that time has turned out roughly a book a year. He writes about what he knows: "I especially want to portray things into which I've been fortunate enough to gain insight, that is, the decline of a class. WASPs have not lost their power, but they have lost their monopoly on power."

All his novels and short stories deal in one way or another with this theme, so much so that many critics have been put off by his exclusive interest in the WASP world--or, to be more exact, by his comparatively untroubled acceptance of its imperatives: "I have always suffered from the suspicion not so much that I write about the wrong people (look at the success of [John] O'Hara and [John P.] Marquand!) but that I write about the wrong people in the wrong way. Perhaps I tend to accept the status quo more than seems acceptable."

This is a shrewd remark, and it suggests one possible reason why Auchincloss has never written an absolutely first-rate novel: He seems too happy. After a successful round of psychoanalysis (apparently there are such things) in the early fifties, Auchincloss accepted himself without reservation. If this account of his life is accurate, he is an obsession-free, comparatively uncomplicated man whose urge to write is rooted more in his desire to record the splendors and miseries of a social class than in any private passions of his own.

It is surely no coincidence that Auchincloss's best novel, the 1964 The Rector of Justin, deals with the only episode in his life that appears to have scarred him: his years at Groton. In The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss fuses his cold-eyed inside knowledge of how the world of privilege really works with his angry memories of "being back amid the varnished walls surrounded by boys who are waiting to kill the smallest aspiration." The result is a novel of considerable power and insight, perhaps the best thing ever written about the American prep school ethos....

He will be missed.

Posted January 27, 3:52 PM

TT: Coming to a TV near you

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour talking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN at the network's studios in Washington, D.C. It was, I said at the time, the best interview I've ever done with anyone on any subject--thorough, challenging, well-informed, impeccably fair. Now you can see for yourself. My appearance on C-SPAN'S Q & A will be telecast twice this coming Sunday, at eight p.m. ET and eleven p.m. ET, with a replay on Monday at six a.m. ET.

If you're not planning to be anywhere near a TV set on Sunday, you'll also be able to watch my C-SPAN interview on your computer via streaming video by going here.

Incidentally, I'll be announcing the subject of my next book during the interview.

Posted January 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Charles Laughton recites the Gettysburg Address in Ruggles of Red Gap, filmed in 1935:

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

Posted January 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is no such thing as justice--in or out of court."

Clarence Darrow (quoted in the New York Times, April 19, 1936)

Posted January 27, 12:00 AM

January 26, 2010

TT: A great actor reads

Here is part of The Storyteller, the long-out-of-print 1961 Capitol LP that preserves a live performance of the one-man touring show in which Charles Laughton read from and talked about some of his favorite works of literature. In this pair of audio clips, Laughton reads an excerpt from Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, reminisces about his first visit to Chartres Cathedral, then reads Psalm 104.

The first part is here:

The second part is here:

Posted January 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Happiness is one of the hardest things to write about, and the difficulty of doing so makes me long to be a musician or a painter, for painters and musicians are at ease with the supreme emotion, which is not grief but joy abounding. To be able to make a joyful noise unto the Lord or a praise of colors and forms would seem to me to equate any man with gods or little children. Happiness annihilates time. We measure history by its catastrophes, we recall the weather by its storms, but the periods of peace and joy--who can describe them?"

Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

Posted January 26, 12:00 AM

January 25, 2010

TT: Made it, Ma, front of the store!

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong was on sale today on the front rack of the New York Times Bookstore in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia Airport:

Posted January 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Still and all

Over the weekend I flew up to New York from Winter Park, Florida, and saw four shows in a row, David Ives' Venus in Fur, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, the last installment of Horton Foote's Orphans' Home Cycle, and Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still. I went straight to the airport from the theater after seeing Time Stands Still on Sunday afternoon and flew back to Florida. This week I'll be teaching a class at Rollins College, writing two pieces, giving a pair of back-to-back lectures at the college on Thursday, doing four Pops-related radio interviews, and gearing up to start another writing project, the liner notes for Hilary Hahn's next album. On Friday my brother and sister-in-law arrive from Smalltown, U.S.A., for a weekend visit, in the course of which we'll be seeing two more shows in Orlando.

In between these varied activities, I've been working on a new opera libretto and--brace yourself--a play. Yes, the play is a great big honking maybe, but we'll see what, if anything, comes of it.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that on Thursday evening I spent several hours undertaking the formidable task of planning my reviewing calendar through the beginning of September, and I went well out of my way to schedule in a two-week vacation. Mrs. T and I intend to go up the spout toward the end of May. I can't wait.

The two of us also managed to set aside a tiny bit of down time in Florida, enough to watch four movies on TV. Two of them, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Sunset Boulevard, were old favorites, while the others, Libeled Lady and Fritz Lang's Man Hunt, were classics that I'd never seen. I even succeeded in reading a newish book, Preston Neal Jones' Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter, and starting a novel that Mrs. T enthusiastically recommended to me, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. And the two of us took an hour off one afternoon and lunched on fabulously good chili dogs at Between the Buns, a wonderful Orlando joint that's built in the shape of (logically enough) a giant hot dog.

Jack, in short, is no kind of dull boy these days. But he sure is looking forward to that vacation come May--and maybe even spending a bit of time wandering aimlessly around Winter Park, a town of which I very much like the looks.

Posted January 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Here's how I'm feeling this week

Enough said?

Posted January 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"First, to speak favorably of whatever promising new work I am able to review within the limits of a monthly column. Second, not to speak unfavorably of what I do not like unless the artist has an established reputation. Third, not to hesitate to attack an inflated reputation. Fourth, to balance to claims of past and present. Fifth, to write for informed consumers, not producers, of art--on the theory that criticism has little reason to expect to influence an artist--who, if he is any good, knows what he is about--and much reason to hope to develop a sympathetic audience for quality in art, wherever it may appear."

S. Lain Faison, Jr., "New Year's Resolutions" (in Expressing Abstraction: Writings on Art for The Nation)

Posted January 25, 12:00 AM

January 22, 2010

TT: Endearingly Earnest

I flew back to New York from Florida last weekend to review two shows for today's The Wall Street Journal, one off Broadway (Ernest in Love) and one on (Present Laughter). One was perfect, the other good but greatly flawed. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Most musicals are born to be big, but some take wing when staged on a small scale. A happy case in point is "Ernest in Love," which is currently being presented with bewitching finesse Off Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theatre. The 1960 stage production of the musical-comedy version of "The Importance of Being Ernest" got great notices but ran for a paltry 103 performances, then vanished largely without trace, leaving behind only a cast album. The Irish Rep's revival, the first of any significance ever to be mounted in New York, is so endearing that I can't help but wonder why so delightful a show disappeared from sight for so long.

Does Oscar Wilde's best play really need music? Of course not. But Anne Croswell (who wrote the book and lyrics) and Lee Pockriss (who wrote the music) managed between them to put a fresh and personal spin on "Earnest": They shifted the emphasis from Wilde's epigrams to his pretty-young-things-in-love plot, thereby turning a masterpiece of diamond-hard verbal ingenuity into a romantic soufflé lightly sauced with wit. No, it's not Wilde, but if you can keep from breaking out in a cheek-to-cheek grin when Jack Worthing (who is played with sweetly boyish charm by Noah Racey) launches into a neat little soft shoe in the first scene, you're just a sour old crock....

Charlotte Moore's staging, which makes perfectly judged use of the Irish Rep's L-shaped 140-seat theater, points up the show's innate charm without once going over the top. The cast is adorable, especially Annika Boras, who plays Gwendolen as a sexy prig...

The revival of Noël Coward's "Present Laughter" that opened on Broadway this week under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company is the same one that I saw performed in Boston three years ago by the Huntington Theatre Company, give or take a couple of new cast members. I liked it with significant reservations in 2007, and I feel the same way now: It's effective, but not the "Present Laughter" of my dreams.

The play, written in 1939 and last seen on Broadway 13 years ago, is one of Coward's finest, a coruscating piece of autobiographical spoofery in which he sent himself up with unexpected honesty (Garry Essendine, Coward's onstage alter ego, is a charismatic but by no means likable piece of fancy goods). In this production, directed with a too-broad brush by Nicholas Martin, Victor Garber is "doing" Coward himself rather than creating a character from scratch, and though his imitation of Coward's speaking voice is eerily exact, he lacks the sleek physical glamour of his well-remembered model. Mr. Garber gets his laughs, but it's hard to see why so many of the women in the play feel moved to fling themselves at his feet....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted January 22, 12:00 AM

TT: The vexing texters

Last May, I found myself seated for the first time behind a philistine who sent a text message in the middle of a show that I was reviewing. She got off lucky--I wasn't armed. Like most civilized folk, I take a hard line on texting during performances. But given the fast-increasing ubiquity of texting, I suspect that we're on a slippery slope here, and so do a number of performing-arts organizations that are starting to experiment with organized texting during performances.

Texting has already been used to poll audiences and let them pick an encore, or choose between alternative endings for a play. Might this be a desirable step toward heightening an audience's involvement in a performance? Or the thin end of a social wedge whose unintended consequences could be highly undesirable? I'll attempt to sort out some possible answers to this tricky question in my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted January 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Posted January 22, 12:00 AM

January 21, 2010

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:
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Parts 1 and 2 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory with third part of cycle, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here and here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO, ILL.:
• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13/R, violence and very strong language, extended through Feb. 14, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Life of Galileo (drama, G, accessible to well-read older teenagers, closes Feb. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Copenhagen (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

Posted January 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born."

Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

Posted January 21, 12:00 AM

January 20, 2010

TT: Whoops!

Apropos of the front cover of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, James Breig, a reader of this blog, writes with a query:

Impertinent question: Is the cover photo reversed (Armstrong's pocket handkerchief is on the right side of his jacket)? If so, was it done deliberately by the photographer or book designer, or inadvertently?

My jaw dropped when I read this e-mail, and I immediately set to investigating. It turns out that the photograph in question, taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965, was in fact reproduced in reverse--both on the cover of Pops and on the Web site of Magnum Photos, which is where the book's designer found it.

When I checked on Monday afternoon, I discovered that another Halsman photograph of Armstrong is reversed on the Magnum site. That one, however, was an easy catch: Armstrong is fingering his trumpet with his left hand, not his right. In the photo on the cover of Pops, by contrast, he has the horn tucked under his arm, and the only immediately obvious clue that the picture is reversed is, as the preternaturally sharp-eyed Mr. Breig noticed, the fact that his handkerchief is on the wrong side.

How could I possibly have let this goof get past me? Because I'm left-handed, I guess (but so is Mr. Breig--that one won't work!). What amuses me most, however, is that until Monday, nobody had noticed it, including a number of Armstrong's friends who read Pops in manuscript. That also includes Joe Muranyi, Armstrong's last clarinet player, who knew him very, very well. I wrote Joe to tell him about it, and his reply made me smile: "It still looks very much like him. The pocket on the wrong side isn't important--doesn't bother me. The only thing that is wrong, when one looks and observes carefully, is that dent in his forehead. It was on the left side of his head!"

If Joe, who spent more time with Armstrong than anyone else I know, didn't catch the mistake on his own, I think I can be forgiven for failing to notice it.

We will, needless to say, be correcting the inadvertent reversal of Philippe Halsman's photograph on the cover of the paperback edition of Pops, which will be coming out in November. (This edition will also contain a number of very tiny corrections to the text, about which more in a future posting.) If you're curious, the image on the right, which was sent to me yesterday afternoon by Mark Robinson, the designer of Pops, shows the front cover of the book with the photo reproduced correctly. Meanwhile, here's the good news: if you bought the hardcover edition of Pops, you now own a collector's item!

As for Mr. Breig, I hereby invite him to proofread my next book.

Posted January 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Thomas Edison talks about Einstein's theory of relativity and the "talkies":

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

Posted January 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

Reason, which fifty times for one does err.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, "A Satire Against Mankind"

Posted January 20, 12:00 AM

January 19, 2010

CAAF: Dana E. Frye

Sorry I've been absent here so long. My dad, who was in fragile health for a couple years, went through a sharp decline in early November. He died on Dec. 2. He was 88, lived a long full life, and died in his bed with my mom holding his hand. We have a lot to be grateful for, I know, but I miss him terribly each day. I had the task of writing his obituary and you can read it here. The ideal version, though, would have a pile of footnotes. Next to the description of him as "indefatigable," for example, there'd be an asterisk offering this translation: "He wasn't easy -- but on the other hand, we were never bored."

Here is a little more that's not in the obituary: My dad was born to parents who were advanced in years and didn't much want a child, let alone an "indefatigable" one. Then the Depression came and his father lost everything, including the will to go on. My dad spent most of his teens hanging out at the Marlborough firehouse because he didn't feel welcome at home. I remember him telling me once that he was always hungry. In an attic somewhere there's a copy of a letter he wrote at 16 to an area businessman asking for advice on how he could get on in the world. Then he joined the Navy and shipped off to the South Pacific. I write this to point out that my father understood hard times and loneliness, and the gifts he had -- his scrappiness, his sense of humor, his generosity to others, his tolerance -- seem bound up to me with the boy he was.

I remember once coming home from school, feeling bleak in that hopeless way that happens when you're a kid and can't even begin to express what's going on to adults. I forget what the specific trouble was, but it must have been a time when I was "out" at school. That happened once in a while. My mom spoiled me but she didn't understand; she was (and remains) the sort of person who's largely impervious to the idea of fitting in (one of the first sayings she taught me was: "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke"), which is a great quality but one I didn't inherit. I remember my dad -- who could be loud and impatient, who usually wanted me to come hold a lawn bag open for him while he raked up leaves or help him pick up dog crap in the backyard -- sort of peering at me when I came in, and then later that afternoon he made me milk-on-toast in a bowl, something I had never had before, and we sat on the high stools in the kitchen looking out the window together, and I felt immeasurably comforted. I don't remember talking to him about what was going on. I didn't have to. He could be good company like that. He must have been 60 then; he'd recently retired against his own inclination (he had become "out" at work), and it was still strange to have him at home.

My stepson wrote my mom a beautiful letter after my dad's death, and he's given me permission to quote from it, "Dana to me was a presence of wry joyfulness. He had a rare talent for making fun of things without reducing their value. I always got the feeling that his humor was coming from a sincere and intimate place. He was an easy guy to be around -- though I should take care not to oversimplify him because I know he could certainly stir things up when he felt like it. I never had to wonder with Dana whether I was getting the whole picture or not, and that always made me feel comfortable." My stepdaughter's card also made me cry. It said simply, "We'll miss him too."

We're holding the memorial celebration this coming Sunday, on what would have been his 89th birthday. I'm looking forward to being with my mom, my three half-siblings, a handful of nieces and nephews, as well as an amazing number of the friends my dad made as he went through the world. Please think of us and raise a toast if you can.

Posted January 19, 12:20 AM

TT: One more once

My guess is that I've probably passed on enough Pops-related links, but here are two more that might interest you:

• The Huffington Post has posted a link to the podcast version of my hour-long interview with Christopher Lydon. This was the most satisfying audio-only interview that I've done about Pops to date, partly because it was so well produced but mostly because Lydon was so well prepared. In truth it's a conversation, not an interview, and my only regret is that Lydon and I weren't in the same studio (he was in Boston, I at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C.). Go here to listen.

Warning, Mom: I say two words out loud in this interview that you won't want to hear. Cover your ears and forgive me--I was only quoting Satchmo!

• The Los Angeles Public Library has posted a podcast of the version of my stump speech that I gave there last month. Go here to download it.

Posted January 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything."

Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (trans. George B. Halsted)

Posted January 19, 12:00 AM

January 18, 2010

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

• I've been sprinting on a treadmill since The Letter went into rehearsal last summer, and the unexpected success of Pops has turned the speed up several notches. I like what's happening to me, but I don't care for some of the side effects.

At the moment I have five jobs, all of them variously demanding: drama critic and arts journalist, biographer, opera librettist, itinerant book-flogger, and visiting scholar-in-residence. One unforeseen consequence of my near-ceaseless activity is that I've temporarily lost the power to relax. I wake up at six-thirty each morning as if prodded by a prison guard, and I find it difficult to sit and do nothing on the rare occasions when it's possible for me to do so. I'm not listening to much music, either, though I can still read for pleasure, especially on trains. Only the other day I wolfed down FDR's Deadly Secret like a fast-food burger on the Acela Express from Washington to New York. For the most part, though, I seem to be going directly from taxi to airport to hotel to lunch to interview to dinner to show to bed, then starting the cycle over again.

Conspicuously absent from this hectic sequence of events is contemplation. Though I now know for sure what my next biography will be and also have a pretty good idea of what my next opera libretto is likely to be, I haven't had much time in recent weeks to stare into space and let my imagination play freely over these projects, much less to spin others out of the air. I actually found myself working on an airplane last night instead of gazing out the window and reveling in the view, which is what I usually do when flying.

While the hubbub caused by Pops will die down fairly soon, I'm still going to be busy, and though I want to be busy, I'm not at all sure how busy I want to be. In a perfect world I'd settle for a single career, but one of the reasons why I do all the different things I do is that none of them pays me quite enough to stay afloat in New York City. Nor would I find it easy to give up any of them, for each is incredibly gratifying and stimulating in its own right.

In addition, I hasten to point out that I have other good reasons for doing all this work. Not only is it gratifying, but it's also self-propagating: fresh opportunities to do exciting things next year are coming to me because of the exciting things I'm doing now. As a thug in The Long Goodbye explained to Philip Marlowe, "I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice." What has vanished along the way, at least for the moment, is the wasted time that is never wasted, the fallow idleness that eventually bears unforeseen fruit. Will my imagination dry up a year from now because I was too busy to daydream today? I wonder.

In 1971 Bill Buckley wrote a book called Cruising Speed in which he described a week in his own horrendously crowded life. At the end he pauses for a moment to consider a letter he had just received from "Herbert," a historian who urged him to turn from his incessant public pursuits and spend more time in intellectual contemplation. "What will be your thoughts," Herbert wrote, "if when you come to your deathbed you look back and realize that all your life amounted to no more than one big highly successful game of power and self-glorification?"

The letter brought Bill up short, and caused him to ask of himself the hard questions that can be found in the penultimate paragraph of Cruising Speed:

Herbert is hauntingly right--c'est que la vérité qui blesse--what are my reserves? How will I satisfy them, who listen to me today, tomorrow? Hell, how will I satisfy myself tomorrow, satisfying myself so imperfectly, which is not to say insufficiently, today; at cruising speed?

I have been no less haunted by that passage ever since I first read it years ago. It never occurred to me to ask Bill about it--I didn't know him well enough--but I wondered when he died in 2008 whether he was still asking himself the same questions. I'm asking them of myself now, and so far I don't have any answers, good or bad.

Posted January 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Pat Metheny's player piano

If you're at all interested in Pat Metheny, or the mechanical reproduction of music, this seven-minute video about Orchestrion, his upcoming album from Nonesuch, will be the most interesting piece of film that you're likely to see today:

Orchestrion goes on sale January 26.

Posted January 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader."

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted January 18, 12:00 AM

January 15, 2010

TT: Playwright in greasepaint

In today's Wall Street Journal I review regional revivals of two of my favorite plays, Steppenwolf's American Buffalo in Chicago and Jobsite Theater's What the Butler Saw in Tampa. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

These days it's no secret that the author of "Superior Donuts" and "August: Osage County" is a superior playwright, but Tracy Letts' parallel career as a stage actor is mostly known only to those Chicagoans who see him performing on occasion with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. I reviewed the 2005 Off-Broadway production of Austin Pendleton's "Orson's Shadow" in which Mr. Letts played Kenneth Tynan, so I know what he can do. Now he's appearing in Steppenwolf's revival of David Mamet's "American Buffalo," and his performance is one of the many highlights of a production so strong that I don't see how it could be bettered.

Unlike "Race," Mr. Mamet's latest effort, which is good but not first-rate, "American Buffalo" is one of the best American plays of the past half-century, a harsh, hurtful portrait of three small-time Chicago crooks who can't figure out how to make it in a money-hungry world that has no room for losers. This production, directed by Amy Morton, who graced the original cast of "August: Osage County," is as blunt and unsparing as a fist in the kidney. It is also very, very funny--I've never seen an "American Buffalo" that got more laughs--which makes the explosion of violence that is the play's climax still more shocking. Above all, Ms. Morton and her cast convey with exceptional clarity the extent to which "American Buffalo" is rooted in a specific time and place, Chicago in the mid-'70s....

"What the Butler Saw" is, after "Noises Off," the most perfect farce to be written in modern times, a masterpiece of satirical savagery disguised as a lightweight sex comedy about extramarital hanky-panky in a lunatic asylum. Joe Orton wrote it in a state of controlled rage at the hypocrisies, sexual and otherwise, of the British establishment, and he made each punch line count. Not only are the jokes wickedly amusing in every sense of the adverb, but they're embedded in a slam-door-A-then-run-through-door-B plot so tightly constructed that the play almost directs itself--so long as you trust the material. Alas, I've yet to see a staging of "What the Butler Saw" whose director was willing to let Orton be Orton, and Jobsite Theater's revival, for all its noisy gusto, makes the usual mistake of overegging the comic pudding....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Here's a scene from Steppenwolf's production of American Buffalo:

Posted January 15, 5:08 PM

TT: Almanac

"Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions."

Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre (trans. John Willett)

Posted January 15, 12:00 AM

January 14, 2010

TT: Blame it on Noël

If you've looked in the right-hand column lately, you know that I enjoyed reading The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them, a book that I wholeheartedly commend to your attention.

Noboby asked me, but the play that changed my life was Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, which I saw for the first time in 1968, performed by the drama club of my small-town high school. Not only was it my first viewing of Blithe Spirit, but it was the first play I'd ever seen in a theater. Alas, I can't tell you anything in particular about the actors or the staging--I was just a boy--but I do remember that I was carried away, not just by Coward's wit but by the improbable and arresting spectacle of a proscenium stage set filled with real people pretending to be fictional characters.

Twelve months later I trod the same boards, playing Miles in The Innocents, and for several years after that I spent a fair amount of my spare time watching, acting in, and helping to produce plays of one kind or another. I was far too self-conscious to be a good actor, but at least I had the sense to know my limitations, and I was more than content to be involved, however peripherally, in the magical craft of live theater.

My theatrical "career" came to an end--or so I thought--when I graduated from college in 1979. While my love of theater remained strong and serious, it changed shape, and for the next couple of decades I was mainly interested in lyric theater: opera, musical comedy, ballet and modern dance. Not until 1999, when I began writing a monthly column for the Washington Post about the arts in New York, did I go to more than a handful of carefully chosen straight plays a year.

The first such play that I wrote about in the Post was Warren Leight's Side Man, the subject of my second column. It made a tremendous impression on me, in part because it portrayed a world that I knew well, that of the working jazz musician. I was hooked all over again, and thereafter I saw as many Broadway and off-Broadway shows as I could shoehorn into my crowded schedule.

In 2003 I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and since then I've reviewed well over seven hundred shows, most of the best of which were straight plays and some of which I will remember for as long as I live. I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Private Fears in Public Places, Orson's Shadow, Doubt, The Coast of Utopia, The Seafarer, The Four of Us, The Starry Messenger, David Cromer's revivals of The Glass Menagerie and Our Town, a letter-perfect Trip to Bountiful that I saw with Horton Foote sitting directly behind me...the list goes on and on. But none of them has changed my life in the way that Blithe Spirit did. Had I not seen it at the tender age of twelve, I doubt very much that I would have gone on to become a drama critic, much less write the libretto for Paul Moravec's The Letter. Few events in my life to date have cast so long or consequential a shadow.

* * *

An excerpt from the 1945 film version of Blithe Spirit, directed by David Lean and starring Rex Harrison as Charles Condomine and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati:

Posted January 14, 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:
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Parts 1 and 2 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with third part of cycle starting on Jan. 7, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here and here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Life of Galileo (drama, G, accessible to well-read older teenagers, closes Feb. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Copenhagen (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)

Posted January 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Yes, I believe in the gentle force of reason, in the long run no one can resist it."

Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

Posted January 14, 12:00 AM

January 13, 2010

TT: Snapshot

"Three Songs by Leadbelly," the only surviving performance film of Leadbelly, shot in 1945:

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

Posted January 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought."

E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (quoted in Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg, Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist)

Posted January 13, 12:00 AM

January 12, 2010

OGIC: Knitwit

Three years ago I learned how to knit, and since then it's been hard to stop. I think the key to my obsession is that knitting is equally an exercise in consumerism and creation: you get to buy something lovely and then make it into a different kind of nice thing. The latter follows what's often a protracted period of deliberation, ruled by a sense of possibility.

Before knitting itself comes a trip to the yarn store, as sweetly anticipated by me and my knitting buddy as a penny-candy store outing by a kid with a five-dollar bill. As goods go, yarn is particularly seductive--pure color and texture in endless variety. Seeing the colors of a yarn together makes each color more fetching. With some yarns, the effect of seeing all the colors together is to make choosing virtually impossible--I've been putting Malabrigo Twist skeins into an online shopping cart and taking them out again every day for the last two weeks.

In terms of presentation, the Chicago store my friend and I favor is to yarn what Whole Foods is to produce: expert at arranging things to snare the eye and make you want to touch--to fondle, really. More than my friend, I choose my purchases without a purpose in mind, validated by the excellent convention of the stash. Not knowing what I'll make is a big part of the pleasure. In this way I end up with two skeins of most of what I buy, and consequently a lot of scarves and hats.

An editor I used to work for sometimes got to reminiscing about her idyllic housewife/mom days. As a representative experience of that time, she usually invoked afternoons spent at the market searching for the perfect tomato--not time spent in the kitchen chopping it. With a couple of possible exceptions, I've been a lot less taken with the items I've knitted than with the yarn I started with and its pure potential. I don't think this is just because I'm not a great knitter, though I'm not. I love the first ten rows of every project--watching it barely begin to become something. But mostly I seem to love shopping.

Posted January 12, 10:48 AM

TT: Almanac

"When you're in a performance-capture setting or green screen, you're getting back to the real basic stuff of acting. You don't have a lot of things presented to you in a rehearsal room, either. In a rehearsal room your real resource as an actor aren't the things around you; your resources are your imagination and your director and the other actors. In those close quarters your imagination and your skills are what you turn to."

Stephen Lang (quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 20, 2009)

Posted January 12, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

Posted January 12, 12:00 AM

January 11, 2010

WAS THELONIOUS MONK'S MUSIC CRAZY?

Posted January 11, 11:05 AM

TT: Still rolling along

On Saturday afternoon I talked about and signed copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the modest three-story home in Queens where Armstrong lived with Lucille, his fourth wife, from 1943 until his death in 1971. I've been there more than once, but this was the first time I'd paid a visit to the Armstrong house since I started working on Pops in earnest six years ago. Several people who had known the Armstrongs well (including Selma Heraldo, his next-door neighbor) came to hear me speak. So did the great jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis, who brought along a bagful of copies of Pops for me to sign.

It was, needless to say, quite something for me to talk about Armstrong in the basement of his very own home, and to do so after having spent the past six years immersed in his life and work. I can't think of a better way to have put a cap on my book tour--except it seems that I'm not done yet! The popular success of Pops has caught everyone by surprise (except Mrs. T, who told me so months ago and now delights in reminding me of her uncanny prescience). The biggest surprise of all, of course, is that Pops will debut at #32 on the New York Times' extended nonfiction best-seller list for January 17. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I'd expected to wind down my promotional activities on behalf of Pops last week, but instead Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is continuing to schedule radio and TV appearances and newspaper interviews, of which I've done so many since my book tour got going last month that I can no longer keep track of them. At the same time I continue to hold down my day job at The Wall Street Journal, which means that I'm hitting the road every weekend to see shows, some in New York and others in Florida, where I'll be serving for the next month and a half as visiting scholar-in-residence at Rollins College's Winter Park Institute. Needless to say, I scheduled the latter commitment long before I knew that Pops would take off into the lower reaches of the stratosphere, and so I now have no spare time at all.

What I do have is plenty of fresh Pops-related information to pass along:

• The Biographer's Craft, an online newsletter for biographers, published this gratifying piece of news in the January issue:

Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life (Knopf) was the favorite biography of book critics in 2009, according to a TBC analysis that examined 18 of critics' year-end lists of best books....Tied for second were T.J. Stiles's The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf) and Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown). Tied for third place were Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin) and Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton).

Not too shabby, huh?

To read the whole thing, go here and scroll down.

• I flew from Orlando to Washington, D.C., last Thursday to tape an interview with BBC World News America that was telecast the same evening. You can watch it by going here. I spent four hectic minutes answering Matt Frei's rapid-fire questions about Pops, a nerve-racking but exhilarating experience that reminded me of the last scene of Strangers on a Train, in which Farley Granger chases Robert Walker on an out-of-control carousel that explodes. Fortunately, no fatalities were incurred this time around.

• From there I was driven straight to Arlington, where I taped a seven-minute interview with Jeffrey Brown, the arts correspondent of PBS NewsHour, that was posted on "Arts Beat," the show's arts blog, over the weekend. You can watch it by going here.

• The next morning I taped an hour-long TV interview with Brian Lamb that will air on C-SPAN's Q & A some time in the next couple of weeks. It was, as I told Lamb afterward, the best interview I've done with anyone about anything. I'll pass on the air date as soon as it's set, and once the show has been broadcast, you'll be able to watch it by going here.

• I'll be making my first public appearance at Rollins College on Thursday: I'm giving a lecture called "The Truth About Satchmo: Why Louis Armstrong Still Matters" in which I'll be collaborating with a group of top local jazzmen. For more information, go here. If you live in Winter Park or the Orlando area, come see me talk and get your copy of Pops signed afterward.

• Lest we forget, I had a life before Pops, and Bookpod, a new site that specializes in "audio essays by writers of lasting value," recently taped an interview with me in which I talk about the experience of moving from a small town to a big city and the effects that it has had on my career. To hear the interview or download it as a podcast, go here.

Posted January 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There are two reasons why people don't make good writers: (a) they have nothing to write about, (b) they are not at home with the written word (however fluent they may be in the spoken word). The latter is by far the most potent reason. If you can write, you'll find something to write about; having something to write about doesn't make you a writer. Not that there is the slightest obligation to write, moral or social, as far as I can see. I have the deepest admiration and respect for people who can live perfectly well without writing, who get along without this crutch."

D.J. Enright, Injury Time: A Memoir (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted January 11, 12:00 AM

January 10, 2010

TT: Frederick W. Huff, R.I.P.

I suspect that just about everyone who grows up to be an egghead meets at some crucial point in his youth an older person who makes him feel as though it's all right to take an interest in intellectual pursuits. For me, that person was Frederick W. Huff, the librarian of the high school in the small Missouri town where I grew up. He was, like most of the librarians I've known well, something of an eccentric, a violin-playing opera buff with a stately air and a deep, plummy voice who never met a polysyllable he didn't like. Why he chose a place like Smalltown, U.S.A., in which to start a family and build a library was never clear to me, but it was my great good fortune that he did so.

Mr. Huff--I never called him "Fred" to his face, not even after I grew up--put together a richly varied collection of books and records that fed my curiosity for four blissful years. He also gave me my first summer job, and I never ceased to marvel at the just-so precision with which he regulated each and every aspect of his professional life. Above all, he took my dreams seriously, and long after I graduated from high school and started making my way in the world, I made a point of stopping by his office from time to time to tell him of my latest adventures and find out what was new in his life. He was, I knew, proud of my work as a writer, and I was prouder still to have lived up to his great expectations. Alas, the protracted illness that finally caught up with Mr. Huff this morning left him incapable of appreciating the success of The Letter. How he would have loved hearing the backstage gossip--and how I would have loved to tell him all about it!

The small towns of America are full of men and women like Fred Huff. Rarely do they make headlines, but their devotion changes countless lives for the better. He changed mine, and I will always revere his memory.

Posted January 10, 10:25 PM

THE ROAD GOES ON FOREVER

Posted January 10, 12:17 PM

AMERICA'S FAVORITE PLAYS

Posted January 10, 11:33 AM

January 8, 2010

TT: Science takes the stage

My first Wall Street Journal drama column of 2010 is a report from Florida on two exceptional revivals, Asolo Rep's Life of Galileo and West Palm Beach's Copenhagen. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Sarasota's Asolo Repertory Theatre has dared to put on "The Life of Galileo," a large-cast play that is rarely seen in America, at a time when the sour economy is forcing most drama companies to steer clear of costly highbrow shows. Yet Michael Donald Edwards's staging, which fields a budget-busting cast of 24, is not a bare-bones antispectacle but a masterpiece of unified design in which Clint Ramos's modern-dress costumes, Dan Scully's ultracontemporary digital projections, Peter West's lighting and Fabian Obispo's minimalist music are blended into a production whose clean, elegant look is uncommonly fresh and involving. I've never seen a handsomer Brecht revival.

All this would be irrelevant, of course, were the title role being played by a less magnetic actor than Paul Whitworth, who gives us an earthy, Cockney-flavored Galileo (he sounds very much like Michael Caine) whose love of sensual pleasure is at war with his iron determination to follow the truth wherever it may lead....

Unlike "The Life of Galileo," "Copenhagen" is a genuinely popular play. Not only did it run for 326 performances on Broadway after opening there in 2000, but it still gets done with better-than-fair regularity by regional theaters around the country, partly because it's so good and partly because it has only three characters and needs no scenery or props. What "Copenhagen" demands is first-class acting, and Palm Beach Dramaworks' revival, directed with tautness and unexpected physical immediacy by J. Barry Lewis, supplies that commodity in abundance.

Like the company's 2009 production of Eugène Ionesco's "The Chairs," also directed by Mr. Lewis, this staging takes a difficult play and makes it cellophane-clear. Christopher Oden, Colin McPhillamy and Elizabeth Dimon, all of whom are new to me, bat Michael Frayn's arcane conversational gambits back and forth like shuttlecocks...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted January 08, 12:00 AM

TT: America's favorite plays

American Theatre published in its October issue a list of the ten plays and musicals that are slated to be produced most frequently by American drama companies in the 2009-10 season. The online version of this piece contains links to similar lists going all the way back to the 1994-95 season, so I combined the last ten and created a meta-list of the most frequently produced plays of the decade. To find out what I learned from this exercise, read my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Here's a hint: Samuel Beckett didn't make the cut. Neither did Arthur Miller. Neither did George Bernard Shaw. Neither did Rodgers and Hammerstein....

Curious? You know what to do.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted January 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality."

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Posted January 08, 12:00 AM

January 7, 2010

TT: The road goes on forever

I am, or was, in Winter Park, Florida, preparing to take up my duties as a visiting scholar-in-residence at the Winter Park Institute and part-time teacher of criticism at Rollins College. But the ongoing saga of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is still going strong, so by the time most of you read these words, I'll be flying north to Washington, D.C., where I'm speaking at Politics and Prose at seven p.m. tonight and making a string of radio and TV appearances later today and tomorrow morning. Among other things, I'm taping an interview with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, about which more as soon as I know the air date.

I'll be taking the train to New York after finishing up my last taping on Friday, and my plan is to spend the evening doing nothing whatsoever. On Saturday afternoon I'll be speaking about Pops at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, about which more here. (Alas, you can't come if you don't already have a ticket--the event is sold out.) I fly back to Orlando that night, then scoop up Mrs. T and drive to Tampa on Sunday to see Jobsite Theatre's production of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw, one of my favorite plays. On Monday we return to Winter Park, where I teach my first class on Tuesday morning.

As if all that weren't enough for one long weekend:

• Pops has just been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, about which more here.

• Pops debuts at #32 on the New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list for January 17.

Yeah, I know, I buried the lead. Sue me.

Posted January 07, 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:
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Parts 1 and 2 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with third part of cycle starting on Jan. 7, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here and here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

Posted January 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Address to younger writers, who think older writers like me are so famous and so different. We are no different at all, we are just the same as other writers, only we work harder."

Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, Sept. 10, 1962

Posted January 07, 12:00 AM

January 6, 2010

TT: Kenneth Noland, R.I.P.

Color-field abstraction long ago ceased to be fashionable, but in the Sixties it was one of the most admired movements in modern American art, and Kenneth Noland, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-five, was one of its most celebrated practitioners.

To his admirers, Noland's circles and chevrons were as endlessly and subtly varied as Giorgio Morandi's jugs and bottles. Clement Greenberg, his greatest critical admirer, spoke of how Noland was "not interested in circles as such, but in concentricity and color," going on to say that he used those elements "for the sake of feeling, and as vehicles of feeling." As time went by and fashion changed, fewer people responded to Noland's work, but he continued to be regarded as a master by those who shared his fecund fascination with the expressive power of pure color.

I have a passion for Noland's paintings, and four years ago ago I was lucky enough to acquire Circle I (II-3), a 1978 monoprint on handmade paper that I wrote about here. I love everything in the Teachout Museum, but that particular piece is a special treasure, and since I'm in Florida and Circle I (II-3) is in Manhattan, I thought I'd post a snapshot of it in order to remind myself of how beautiful it is.

Alas, I never met the man who made it, but if I had, I would have done my best to tell him how much his art meant--and means--to me.

Posted January 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

John Wayne talks to the CBC about the art of acting:

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

Posted January 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Movies in America destroy that fine, seldom even perceived sense of the importance and dignity of one's own life."

Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, August 27, 1945

Posted January 06, 12:00 AM

January 5, 2010

TT: The two best fan letters I've ever gotten

The first is from a famous musician:

What an incredible job you did, Terry. Pops is not only the best biography of a jazz musician ever, but you really reclaimed Louis from that sad, brown, PBS-y place that Ken Burns & Co. sat him down in that took all the life out of him and used him as a prop to tell their same-old same-old. This book was about Louis and brings his incredible life and music back to full luster. And I learned so much too, of course. Knowing the basics and a few details, your book straightened me out on a few things and, best of all, sent me listening anew....

The second is from a soldier:

I wanted to write a thank-you letter for the wonderful book Pops. I had been looking forward to reading it since I first read about it on your blog. I am serving with the Army in Afghanistan, and I had to order it as soon as it was published. It was a great read on my long shifts, and I wanted to tell you that being able to read about Armstrong's sunny disposition keeps my spirits up. I only have a few recordings of his music here (luckily one is "West End Blues"), and now I listen to them almost every day. We can't actually download music here, so I will have to wait to hear "Potato Head Blues" and "Snafu", but because of your book, Armstrong's music is one more thing to look forward to when I get back....

These two e-mails came on the same day. I can't tell you how proud I felt as I read them.

Posted January 05, 10:02 AM

TT: Scenes from a marriage (cont'd)

Time: five p.m. on New Year's Eve. Place: the living room of a rural farmhouse in Connecticut.

HE Do I really have to wrap all these presents? You know I can't wrap presents.

SHE You can't cook, either.

HE But they look awful. Everybody's going to laugh when they see them--they'll know I wrapped them. Couldn't we just put them in grocery bags or something? I used to do that when I was a kid.

SHE (very patiently) Do the best you can. It's the thought that counts.

HE I guess it's sort of the Marxist approach to wrapping presents.

SHE Huh?

HE From each according to his ability, to each according to his means.

SHE That's the most pretentious thing you've said all year. Just shut up and wrap, O.K.?

Posted January 05, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"We live on the thin ice of unexplained phenomena."

Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, October 14, 1944

Posted January 05, 12:00 AM

January 4, 2010

TT: South to a warmer place

Mrs. T and I flew the coop last Friday and headed down to Florida for a weekend of snow-free playgoing. On Saturday we saw Asolo Rep's production of Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo in Sarasota, then drove across the peninsula to West Palm Beach to catch a revival of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

Today we drive north to Winter Park, where I'll be spending the next six weeks in residence at the Winter Park Institute, a talking-and-thinking shop on the campus of Rollins College, the liberal-arts school where I spoke last March. That experience was so uncomplicatedly enjoyable that I happily accepted an invitation to set up shop there this winter. Among other things, I'll be giving speeches, teaching a class in journalistic criticism, and signing copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong whenever and wherever anybody puts one in front of me.

Life goes on no matter where I happen to be, so I'll be spending my weekends seeing plays on Broadway and elsewhere in Florida and writing about them in The Wall Street Journal. I'll also be making a pair of Pops-related appearances on Thursday and Saturday in Washington, D.C., and at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. (Read all about them here.)

Insofar as possible, though, I mean to settle into the life of a peripatetic academic. I teach my first class tomorrow--and I can't wait.

UPDATE: It's not warm enough in West Palm Beach this morning! Can I send this state back for a refund?

Posted January 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Every artist is in business for his health."

Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, August 31, 1966

Posted January 04, 12:00 AM

January 2, 2010

PLAY

Posted January 02, 11:55 AM

BOOK

Posted January 02, 11:46 AM

TV

Posted January 02, 11:38 AM

January 1, 2010

TT: My motto for 2010 is...

Posted January 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Something might be gaining on you

If you read this blog at all regularly, I don't need to tell you what happened to me in 2009. If not, I wrote an opera libretto and published a book, both of which were well received. I also traveled all over America reviewing plays for The Wall Street Journal, some of which were pretty damn wonderful. Best of all, I settled happily into the second year of my marriage to Mrs. T, which has been and will undoubtedly continue to be a rip-roaring success.

What next? Well, I now know what my next book is going to be, and I'll let you know about that as soon as the ink is dry on the contract. Paul Moravec and I are talking about what our next opera will be, and I'll let you know about that as soon as (1) we make up our minds and (2) somebody agrees to pay us to write it. And Mrs. T and I are flying down to Florida later today, about which much, much more on Monday, by which time we'll have seen shows in Sarasota and West Palm Beach. Cool, huh?

New Year resolutions? I've made two: (1) Do less. (2) Sleep more. Don't expect me to keep either one, though.

No Wall Street Journal today, so no drama column today. I'll see you next week. Have a fabulous year!

Posted January 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man."

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "The Path of the Law"

Posted January 01, 12:00 AM