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May 31, 2010
EXHIBITION
Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010: A Tribute (Guggenheim, 1071 Fifth Ave., up through June 20). Four carefully chosen canvases painted between 1959 and 1981 by one of the masters of the now-unfashionable Color Field style of abstract expressionism. Needless to say, Noland is sorely in need of a full-scale retrospective, but this anti-blockbuster show contains the root of the matter (TT).Posted May 31, 7:33 AM
CD
Mitchell's Christian Singers, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1 (1934-1936) (Document). The rough-hewn, sometimes startlingly dissonant a cappella harmonies of this vocal quartet, which traveled from North Carolina to Carnegie Hall in 1939 to sing at John Hammond's first From Spirituals to Swing concert and subsequently got written up in Time, have since caught the ears of everyone from Bob Crosby to Maria Muldaur. The first volume of Document's comprehensive reissue of the group's 78 recordings contains its best-known side, "Traveling Shoes," plus plenty of other gospel songs that swing and shout like nobody's business (TT).Posted May 31, 7:24 AM
CD
Johnny Hodges: The Small Group Sessions 1941-1952 (Phantasm, three CDs). A wonderfully handy new collection of key recordings by Duke Ellington's unflappable alto saxophone soloist, a universally admired yet inexplicably underrated instrumental master who was equally adept at sensuous balladry, hard-swinging riff tunes, and deep-dish blues. From start to finish, this set is packed full of unpretentious, deeply satisfying jazz (TT).Posted May 31, 7:08 AM
BOOK
Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, $45). This disquieting study of England's most respectable prejudice argues all too convincingly that British anti-Semitism has not only failed to wither away but is currently experiencing an alarming upsurge. Not a pleasant read, but an indispensable one (TT).Posted May 31, 7:03 AM
NOVEL
John P. Marquand, So Little Time. All but forgotten today, this 1943 study of a disappointed playwright who married up and sold out is also a powerfully evocative snapshot of America on the eve of World War II. It's not a great book by any means, and Marquand would work the same turf more effectively in Point of No Return and Women and Thomas Harrow, but I can't think of another American novel that does a better job of suggesting what it felt like to watch the world sliding toward catastrophe (TT).Posted May 31, 6:54 AM
PLAY
That Face (City Center, closes June 27). No matter how suspicious you may be of prodigies, make an exception for Polly Stenham's first play, a a tale of a grossly dysfunctional upper-middle-class family that she wrote when she was just nineteen years old. The New York premiere of That Face, presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, is a superlative piece of work, staged with shrieking tautness by Sarah Benson and featuring memorable performances by Laila Robins and Cristin Milioti. Only time will tell whether Stenham has staying power, but this play bodes well for her future (TT).Posted May 31, 6:46 AM
DVD
Stagecoach (Criterion Collection). A "B" movie raised to the level of art by the impeccable direction of John Ford, this 1939 film defined the Hollywood Western and made John Wayne a star. Now it's been remastered as handsomely as modern technology permits (the original negative no longer survives) and fitted out with all sorts of Criterion Collection-style extras. In any form, Stagecoach is a cinematic landmark--and one of the most purely enjoyable American films of the Thirties (TT).Posted May 31, 6:40 AM
TT: In memoriam
An excerpt from Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, performed by the Bay Brass Ensemble at the Stanford University Memorial Church:
Posted May 31, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It was horrible to think of a man so young and able dying so uselessly. In that moment Nellie found that war itself is understandable. It's the things that go along with it, things that happen to people you know, that are incomprehensible, and have been in all ages."
James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific
Posted May 31, 12:00 AM
May 30, 2010
TOO MUCH OF A GREAT THING
"The world would doubtless be a poorer place if nobody could see Renoir's 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' or listen to the Hallelujah Chorus for a full year. But imagine the effect that such a moratorium would have on our responses to those works come next May. Wouldn't you like to be able to recapture the immediacy with which you first made the acquaintance of Charles Foster Kane once upon a half-remembered time?..."Posted May 30, 10:36 PM
May 28, 2010
TT: Where in the world are Terry and Mrs. T? (3)
Right here:
Posted May 28, 10:24 AM
TT: Better than Broadway
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is the last of three consecutive reports about my most recent playgoing trip to Chicago. This week I review TimeLine Theater Company's prouction of The Farnsworth Invention and Chicago Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
What is it that makes Chicagoland theater so special--and so different from theater in New York? If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I'd be stuck for words. If, on the other hand, I could send you to a show that embodies the differences between America's two great theater towns, I might well pick TimeLine Theatre Company's production of Aaron Sorkin's "The Farnsworth Invention," a play that didn't fully convince me when I first saw it three years ago on Broadway but which I bought hook, line and sinker when I saw it again last week in Chicago.
Mr. Sorkin's play, which is now making the regional rounds, dramatizes the battle between Philo T. Farnsworth (Rob Fagin), the hayseed genius from Utah who more or less invented television, and David Sarnoff (PJ Powers), the ruthless boss of RCA, who sought to purloin Farnsworth's patents and place the rights to TV under his well-manicured thumb. In Mr. Sorkin's heavily fictionalized (and factually falsified) version, the Farnsworth-Sarnoff fight becomes a slickly effective morality play about corporate greed--or so, at any rate, it seemed when I saw Des McAnuff's original production in 2007. Not so TimeLine's spare, bare-bones staging, directed by Nick Bowling, which scrapes all the slickness off Mr. Sorkin's script and infuses it with a surging physical vitality that knocked me off my feet....
Save for "The Merchant of Venice," "The Taming of the Shrew" is the least politically correct of Shakespeare's plays, and the one that makes directors squirm most uncomfortably when they try to render it palatable to present-day audiences. Now Chicago Shakespeare is putting on a production directed by Josie Rourke that seeks to accomplish that feat in a striking new way: Playwright Neil LaBute has wrapped a "frame" around the play that offers an up-to-the-minute take on Shakespeare's old-fashioned portrayal of the war between the sexes. In the Rourke-LaBute version, we're present at the final rehearsals for a production of "The Taming of the Shrew" whose director (Mary Beth Fisher) is feuding with her girlfriend (Bianca Amato), a hot-blooded actress with a wandering eye who happens to be playing Kate, the proto-feminist hellion whom Petruchio (Ian Bedford) is resolved to subdue and wed. Not surprisingly, all hell breaks loose backstage--some of which makes its way onstage.
Not only is this "Kiss Me, Kate"-like concept executed with unexpected comic deftness by Mr. LaBute, whom no one has ever accused of having a feathery touch, but Ms. Rourke's well-cast mounting of the play proper is bold, bawdy and bluntly funny. Therein lies the catch: The two halves of the show don't need one another. I kept wishing that Mr. LaBute had written a full-length backstage farce à la "Noises Off," and I couldn't quite shake the feeling that he and Ms. Rourke were somehow apologizing for the fact that her vibrantly traditional staging of Shakespeare's play is so satisfying in its own right....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 28, 12:00 AM
TT: A masterpiece moratorium
A new book about Miles Davis' Kind of Blue has just been published--the third to appear in the past decade. Granted that Kind of Blue is a masterpiece and thus by definition worthy of extended discussion and analysis, that still strikes me as a bit excessive, and in light of the album's undiminished cultural ubiquity, I was inspired to write a "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal in which I suggest that one of the best things we can do with masterpieces is give them an occasional rest.
Would the world end if we all agreed not to listen to Kind of Blue for the next twelve months, or watch Citizen Kane? Or might such a moratorium actually sharpen our responses to these over-familiar works of art? If those questions pique your interest, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 28, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Posted May 28, 12:00 AM
May 27, 2010
TT: Art Linkletter, R.I.P.
Once Art Linkletter was ubiquitous. Now he's forgotten, save by senior citizens and those who, like me, are inching slowly but surely toward the sixtieth meridian. Such is fame in the age of television.
For those with very long memories, here's the opening segment of a 1965 episode of House Party, Linkletter's long-lived CBS daytime series--it ran on radio from 1945 to 1967 and on TV from 1952 to 1969--in which he interviews Lucille Ball:
Posted May 27, 7:29 AM
TT: Where in the world are Terry and Mrs. T? (2)
Right here:
Posted May 27, 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:
• La Cage aux Folles * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)
IN CHICAGO:
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, extended through July 18, reviewed here)
IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine (satire, G, not easily accessible to children, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN CHICAGO:
• The Good Soul of Szechuan (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
Posted May 27, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favor of 'realism.' The search for the direct and the literal produces some of our best effects."
Orson Welles, "Orson Welles Today," New York Post, May 23, 1945
Posted May 27, 12:00 AM
May 26, 2010
TT: Snapshot
The Red Norvo Trio plays "Fascinating Rhythm," with Tal Farlow on guitar and Steve Novosel on bass:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted May 26, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Posted May 26, 12:00 AM
May 25, 2010
OGIC: Whole cloth
There are Booker Prize winners and there are Booker Prize winners. I still vaguely rue the day that I read online about the 2003 prize going to D. B. C. Pierre's Vernon God Little and stopped at the bookstore on the way home from work to impulsively buy it--in hardcover, no less. A few pages were enough to relegate it to the sell pile.
What a different world is the 2009 winner, Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel's thrilling novel of the Tudor court has been praised to the skies everywhere, so it's not news that I'm spellbound near the halfway point. Yet the novel defies being rushed through, so I've been pacing myself, even starting and finishing other novels along the way (specifically, Zoë Heller's The Believers and lately Notes on a Scandal, about which more another time). I pick up Wolf Hall when I'm feeling focused, receptive, and equal to its plenitude.
Like a Renaissance court painter, Mantel saves some of her best effects for depicting cloth--its color, texture, even the way it smells. In this middle-of-the-night scene, she describes King Henry VIII's robe:
Henry slowly smiles. From the dream, from the night, from the night of shrouded terrors, from maggots and worms, he seems to uncurl, and stretch himself. He stands up. His face shines. The fire stripes his robe with light, and in its deep folds flicker ocher and fawn, colors of earth, of clay.
The fabric is fine, but still the stuff of Henry's nightmares. Later in the same scene, the book's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is leaving the king. He thinks of his late friend and patron Cardinal Wolsey, exiled by Henry earlier in the novel and eventually arrested, and the fate of the cardinal's vestments. The memory speaks to him of air, not earth like Henry's garment.
He thinks back to the day York Place was wrecked. He and George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the cardinal's vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they were repacked and nailed into their traveling chests, the king's men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each folded, by an expert touch, into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the linen bands; here, let me, George Cavendish said. Freed, the cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth's wing. When the lids of the vestments chests were raised there was the smell of cedar and spices, somber, distant, desert-dry. But the floating angels had been packed away in lavender; London rain washed against the glass, and the scent of summer flooded the dim afternoon.
When they were first seized, early in the novel, the garments didn't seem so evanescent--they had a substance, structure, and authority that have fled in Cromwell's memory of them.
They bring out the cardinal's vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemize it, and having reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their traveling crates. Cavendish flinches: "For God's sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?"
Tapestries, as distinct from paintings, receive a similar emphasis in the novel. More about that next week.
Posted May 25, 1:06 PM
TT: Where in the world are Terry and Mrs. T? (1)
Right here:
Posted May 25, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time--in the cinema there is only one."
Orson Welles, interview, Cahiers du Cinéma in English, No. 5, 1966
Posted May 25, 12:00 AM
May 24, 2010
TT: Yoicks and away
It occurred to me earlier this year that I couldn't remember the last time I took a full-fledged two-week vacation, by which I meant two weeks spent away from home during which I (A) saw no shows and (B) wrote no pieces. When I shared this piece of information with Mrs. T, she promptly informed me that I'd better change my ways if I wanted to remain happily married. I know marching orders when I hear them, so I planned and booked a spring holiday and gave my editors at The Wall Street Journal several months' worth of fair warning. Given the fact that the past year has seen, among countless other things, the opening of The Letter and the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I figured I'd earned some time off.
It is, of course, proverbial that the surest way to hear God laugh is to make a plan. Three Sundays ago I took Mrs. T to an emergency room in Chicago at two in the morning. Two sets of doctors, the first in Chicago and the second in Connecticut, thereupon spent the following two weeks trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with her (gallstones) and what to do about it (nothing invasive, thank God). On Tuesday she was discharged from the University of Connecticut Health Center, and yesterday we hit the road.
You will note that I haven't said where we went, where we are now, or where we're going next. Nor will I. The plug is well and truly pulled. I wrote and filed this week's Wall Street Journal columns in advance of our departure, but I'm taking next week off from the paper, the first time I've done so since I fell ill five years ago and the second time since I became the Journal's drama critic seven years ago. Like I said, this is a vacation, really and truly. We are, for all intents and purposes, incommunicado: I won't be checking my e-mail or voicemail other than sporadically, and I'm not going to write anything at all.
I've uploaded the usual almanac entries, weekly videos, and theater-related postings for the next two weeks, so you'll see my ghostly presence during our absence. It's just possible--barely--that I might tweet once or twice about the joys of taking it easy. Otherwise, though, I will have nothing to say on any subject whatsoever, here or anywhere else, until June 7.
If you happen to see me between now and then, kindly keep it to yourself.
Posted May 24, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing natural calamities. And such is the certainty of evil, that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety."
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, July 7, 1750 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
Posted May 24, 12:00 AM
May 21, 2010
TT: The right stuff
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I weigh in on the New York premiere of Polly Stenham's That Face, and I also report on the opening of another Chicago show, David Cromer's staging of A Streetcar Named Desire. Both reviews are flat-out raves. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
"That Face" is a commanding piece of work that never puts a foot wrong. I watched it with the sense that I was present at the debut of an artist who might someday have even better things in her.
Outside of her age, Ms. Stenham has nothing in common with Ms. Delaney. She is a child of privilege, the daughter of a twice-divorced businessman who attended Eton and Cambridge, and "That Face," not at all surprisingly, is a tale of a grossly dysfunctional upper-middle-class family whose two children are choking on their own rage. I can't think of a less interesting subject on paper--nothing is more tiresome than the whiny angst of well-off adolescents--but Ms. Stenham has somehow contrived to portray the over-familiar plight of Henry and Mia (Christopher Abbott and Cristin Milioti) with a freshness and force that took me aback.
Part of this, I'm sure, is due to the galvanic performances of Ms. Milioti, who first caught my eye in the Irish Repertory Theatre's 2007 revival of "The Devil's Disciple," and the unfailingly excellent Laila Robins, who plays a drunken mother whose attachment to her son is too close for comfort. I'm just as sure that Sarah Benson, whose staging is shriekingly taut, has made the most of "That Face."
Yet the play is deserving of its production--and in a way that is itself unusual enough to be worthy of note, since nobody says anything eloquent or even especially memorable in "That Face." Instead of giving her principal characters high-flown speeches to speak, Ms. Stenham has put them at the center of a near-pure drama of situation and event, one in which the blame for their collective plight is distributed with a fair-mindedness that is rare in a very young writer....
David Cromer, the foremost stage director of his generation, has outdone himself with Writers' Theatre's revelatory new production of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." You'd think that all there is to say about so popular a play would have been said long ago, but it is Mr. Cromer's special gift to make old plays seem new without rendering them unrecognizable. His "Streetcar," like the productions of "Our Town," "The Glass Menagerie" and "Picnic" that came before it, strips the accumulated layers of convention and preconception off the surface of a classic and brings the viewer face to face with the play itself.
Mr. Cromer and his set designer, Collette Pollard, have reconfigured Writers Theatre's 108-seat performance space as a theater in the round and placed the two-room railroad flat of Stanley and Stella Kowalski (Matt Hawkins and Stacy Stoltz) in the center of the house, putting the members of audience as close to the action as it is possible to get. (I was seated eight feet from the Kowalskis' bed.) The intimacy of this setup makes you feel as though you're eavesdropping on "Streetcar" rather than merely watching it. It also makes it possible for the members of Mr. Cromer's ensemble cast to underplay a show that is almost always overplayed....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 21, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It was with my special concurrence, and indeed at my suggestion, that he went on with his law studies with undiminished zeal, as there is nothing so repugnant to me as a musician who is that alone, without any higher general culture."
Richard Wagner, letter to Franziska von Bülow, Sept. 19, 1850
Posted May 21, 12:00 AM
May 20, 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:
• La Cage aux Folles * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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 Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine (satire, G, not easily accessible to children, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• The Good Soul of Szechuan (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 29, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 30, reviewed here)
Posted May 20, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
Nothing has ever been too good for the public.
Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.
Orson Welles, undated memorandum, 1942
Posted May 20, 12:00 AM
May 19, 2010
TT: Snapshot
Webb Pierce sings "There Stands the Glass":
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted May 19, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"I like music that is proud of itself."
Bernard Herrmann (quoted in Steven Smith, A Heart at Fire's Center)
Posted May 19, 12:00 AM
May 18, 2010
TT: The beat goes on
Believe it or not, I'm still giving speeches about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and my next one will take place on Thursday at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library. The address is 455 Fifth Avenue and the festivities get underway is six-thirty sharp.
If you've somehow managed to miss my dog-and-pony show until now, it's time to plug this yawning hole in your life--and to get your copy of Pops signed, assuming that you own one, no other assumption being possible. I do have one more Pops-related New York appearance set for Bryant Park on August 11, but why wait until then when you can see me now?
For more details, go here.
Posted May 18, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Actors and directors are not, generally speaking, well qualified for any other job; most hit on their vocations precisely because they seemed no good for anything else. This is the moment at which character and power of endurance--what the Victorians used to call 'bottom'--becomes almost as important as talent, and much more important than luck."
Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans
Posted May 18, 12:00 AM
May 17, 2010
TT: Not in my front yard
In the New York edition of today's Wall Street Journal, I review The Bilbao Effect, Oren Safdie's new play about the splendors and miseries of postmodern starchitecture. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Architecture is the only art form about which everybody has an opinion--because everybody has to live with it. Some buildings, however, are harder to live with than others, and in recent years a growing number of them have been the work of big-name "starchitects" who appear at times to be more interested in making a splash than ensuring the day-to-day livability of their buildings. Enter Oren Safdie, the son of the famous modernist architect Moshe Safdie, who in 2003 wrote a witty and knowing play called "Private Jokes, Public Places" in which he ran a sharp skewer through the pretensions of a generation of starchitects who give the impression of having forgotten that human beings live in and near the buildings they design....
Now Mr. Safdie is back at the Center for Architecture with a sequel, "The Bilbao Effect," in which the principal characters from "Private Jokes, Public Places" return to the stage to conduct a furiously farcical debate over the wholly serious subject of the architect's responsibility to the people whose lives he touches.
The play's title is, of course, a nod to Frank Gehry's 1997 branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, an avant-garde building so self-consciously spectacular that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Its success persuading other institutions to undertake the construction of equally over-the-top structures in the hopes of drawing visitors whose spending will galvanize the local economy and enhance their own bottom lines. In "The Bilbao Effect," Mr. Safdie imagines that Staten Island's city fathers have succumbed to a similar case of architectural hubris and allowed the egomaniacal Erhardt Shlaminger (Joris Stuyck) of "Private Jokes, Public Places" to build a Gehry-like urban-renewal project in the middle of town....
Good plays of ideas allow the audience to make up its own mind about the relative merits of the characters' arguments. One of the best things about "Private Jokes, Public Places" was Mr. Safdie's willingness to let everyone look stupid at one time or another, whereas in "The Bilbao Effect" Schlaminger and his smug lawyer (John Bolton) are too obviously the villains of the piece.
All this notwithstanding, "The Bilbao Effect" is both funny and cruelly smart in its portrayal of the lunatic excesses of the more extreme varieties of starchitecture. Perhaps the shrewdest of Mr. Safdie's touches is the way in which he conceives of the debate over such architecture as a class war...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 17, 12:00 AM
TT: Not quite at our picture-perfect best
As some of you are aware, my recent visit to Chicago was a bit on the stressful side. Mrs. T was laid low with gallstones a week ago, thus necessitating an emergency-room visit and a stay at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. We are immensely grateful to the staffs of both Northwestern and the Hyatt Regency, who knew exactly what to do when I called the switchboard at two a.m. and asked for the address of the nearest hospital.
We returned to the East Coast last Friday on schedule, and Mrs. T is now resting more or less comfortably up in Connecticut as we wait for her doctors there to decide what they want to do next. I'll keep you posted.
Posted May 17, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"He had crashed through the barrier. He had stopped worrying and started relaxing. He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing. I knew that place. I lived there."
Lee Child, Killing Floor
Posted May 17, 12:00 AM
May 14, 2010
TT: Blood simpler
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is the first in a series of reports about my recent visit to Chicago. This week I review Profiles Theatre's production of Tracy Letts' Killer Joe and the Strawdog Theatre Company's production of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan. Both shows were memorable. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
No matter how unshockable you like to think you are, I expect you'll jump at least once--and probably several times--in the course of Profiles Theatre's scaldingly funny revival of "Killer Joe," the play that made Tracy Letts a big name in American theater 14 years before "August: Osage County" reached Broadway.
First performed in 1993, "Killer Joe" is a blacker-than-black comedy about a shiftless drug dealer (Kevin Bigley) who hires an obliging off-duty cop (Darrell W. Cox) to murder his mother, offering the favors of his unwitting kid sister (Claire Wellin) as a down payment on the cop's chunk of the money from the mother's life-insurance policy. The events that flow from this transaction, all of which take place in a grubby house trailer somewhere on the outskirts of Dallas, are portrayed with extreme explicitness, up to and including in-your-face nudity and the kind of bloodshed you might expect to see in the back room of a butcher's shop on a busy day. If any part of that description strikes you as offputting, stay home and watch a sitcom--but you'll be missing a fabulously well-staged production of one of the best American plays of the past quarter-century....
If you doubt that it's possible to write a political play that is both passionate and poetic, I offer in evidence Bertolt Brecht's "The Good Soul of Szechuan," a parable of capitalism and its discontents that the Strawdog Theatre Company is performing with an exciting blend of fire, fantasy and irreverence.
The last of these qualities is especially important when it comes to the plays of Brecht, which are too often directed so didactically that they become stiff. Not this time: Shade Murray's deceptively casual staging has the helter-skelter feel of a frat party whose guests have decided on the spur of the moment to put on a show. As you enter the black-box theater, a gaggle of musicians in the corner of the room are singing songs by Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. Then, almost without warning, the play gets underway, and before you know it, you're swept up in the tale of a Chinese village whose most spiritually minded citizen is a whore with a heart of 10-karat gold (Michaela Petro, who is terrific). Shen Te has come under the scrutiny of a trio of credulous gods who decide to reward her for her goodness, thereby triggering the law of unintended consequences and bringing about a sequence of dire and farcical events that are portrayed with great gusto by Mr. Murray's fine cast....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 14, 12:00 AM
TT: Picking the winners
In Theatre, his new book, David Mamet lists his ten favorite American plays and explains why he likes them so much. The list, as I observed the other day, is full of surprises, but it's interesting for another reason, which is that it tells the reader at least as much about Mamet himself as it does about the plays he picked. That's almost always true of what I call "practitioner criticism," in which a working artist doubles as a critic of the art form that he practices.
So what do we learn about the author of Glengarry Glen Ross from the fact that Our Town is his favorite American play? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Wall Street Journal and read my "Sightings" column, in which I speculate--fruitfully, I hope--on the insights that David Mamet's top-ten list offers into his theatrical psyche.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 14, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent."
Anton Chekhov, "After the Theatre"
Posted May 14, 12:00 AM
May 13, 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:
• La Cage aux Folles * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 27, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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 Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine (satire, G, not easily accessible to children, closes June 6, reviewed here)
• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 30, reviewed here)
Posted May 13, 12:00 AM
TT: You can count on me
A reader writes:
Loved your book. Found out about your website. Read, with astonishment, your review of Million Dollar Quartet and decided to take my son, who is a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old musician. Saw it last night and loved it. My son came home, whipped out his guitar and played songs from the show for two hours. The concept was so cheesy that I made fun of it, mercilessly, when I heard about it. Never would have gone without reading your review, so...thanks.P.S. A few months ago my wife and I took our son and daughter to see Our Town, also largely based on your review. Our of the best drama experiences we've ever had. Keep those recommendations coming.
I love getting mail like this. It means a lot to me to know that my reviews have caused people to see shows that they wouldn't otherwise have seen.
I hope I don't need to add, by the way, that I take that responsibility very seriously indeed. Theater tickets cost a lot these days. I promise never to deliberately waste your money, or to overpraise a show simply because I think it "deserves" to do well. When I rave about a show, it's for one reason only: because I think it's good.
Posted May 13, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others."
Anton Chekhov, "An Evil Night"
Posted May 13, 12:00 AM
May 12, 2010
TT: Snapshot
"Little Tich et ses Big Boots," a film by Little Tich, the British music-hall comedian, made in 1900:
To hear a 1911 sound recording by Little Tich of "King Ki Ki," go here.
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted May 12, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share."
Anton Chekhov, "About Love"
Posted May 12, 12:00 AM
May 11, 2010
TT: Get to know your inner hypochondriac
In the New York section of today's Wall Street Journal, I review a highly satisfactory off-Broadway show, the Mint Theater Company's revival of Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
On Broadway, you play it safe or lose your shirt. If you want to revive a straight play, you pick something very, very familiar and cast a movie star as your lead. Otherwise, disaster beckons. All the more reason, then, to praise the tiny Off-Broadway troupes that specialize in performing forgotten but eminently stageworthy plays of the past. At the top of the list is the Mint Theater Company, whose dagger-sharp revivals of Rachel Crothers' "Susan and God," John Galsworthy's "The Skin Game" and Harley Granville-Barker's "The Madras House" rank high on my list of memorable nights on the aisle.
Even for so daring a company, the Mint's latest venture would seem to be a stretch. If you've heard of "Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine," you probably come from France, where Jules Romain's most successful play is known to all educated citoyens, or England, where it's been telecast twice by the BBC and revived on numerous occasions, most recently in 1994. In America, by contrast, the play is unknown save to especially well-informed specialists. Yet "Doctor Knock," written in 1923, is a knockout, a saber-toothed satire of the medical profession that could scarcely be more timely now that health-care reform is No. 1 with a hashtag on the list of hot political topics....
The thing that sets Dr. Knock (Thomas M. Hammond) apart from his benighted colleagues is that he sees medicine less as an art than a business, one in which anyone who grasps the principles of modern marketing can make (so to speak) a killing. To this end he opens a free clinic, the purpose of which is to alert his new patients to the fact that they all appear to be suffering from hitherto unsuspected illnesses. (His slogan is "The healthy are merely closet invalids.") The good people of St. Maurice have previously managed to squeak by on home remedies, but his methods are so effective that within three months the town hotel has been turned into an annex to his clinic and the bellboy is inserting thermometers into the hindquarters of dozens of happy hypochondriacs each day....
I'm not even slightly surprised to report that the Mint is performing "Doctor Knock" with consummate savoir-faire. Gus Kaikkonen, who runs New Hampshire's Peterborough Players and previously directed "The Madras House" for the Mint, has polished the script (which is being performed in his own idiomatic translation) until it gleams like a dueling saber, and Mr. Hammond's urbane performance is frighteningly believable....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 11, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality."
Anton Chekhov, "The Teacher of Literature"
Posted May 11, 12:00 AM
May 10, 2010
TT: Hither, yon, etc.
Mrs. T and I met on Friday at O'Hare International Airport, made our way to a downtown hotel, met Our Girl shortly thereafter, and proceeded to the first of the five shows that we'll be seeing in Chicagoland this week. The list includes Strawdog Theatre's Good Soul of Szechuan, TimeLine Theater's The Farnsworth Invention, Chicago Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Profiles Theatre's Killer Joe, and Writers' Theatre's A Streetcar Named Desire, the last of which is directed by David Cromer, about whose gifts longtime readers of this blog will need no reminding. That strikes me as an appropriately wide-ranging list, and I have no doubt that it will keep the three of us hopping between now and week's end, when Mrs. T and I fly back to New York.
This is my first full-scale theater-related road trip since February, and I'm glad to be on the move again after being stuck in New York for two near-solid months. I was no less pleased to be able to spend three days at home with my family, though I broke my glasses and watchband during my visit, subsequently discovering that neither object could be repaired or replaced in Smalltown, U.S.A. My brother, who is handy like Mozart was musical, did his best to glue my glasses back together but finally gave it up as a bad job, so I drove from Smalltown to Kansas City on Thursday without benefit of eyeware. I got there in one piece, didn't kill or maim anyone along the way, and managed to read a lecture about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong out loud to a full and enthusiastic house at the Kansas City Public Library, thereby demonstrating the wisdom of my longstanding precautionary practice of printing out my speech texts in twenty-two-point Comic Sans MS Bold type, which may be totally unhip but is big and clear enough for me to read without glasses.
I have to write two columns for The Wall Street Journal during our stay in Chicago, so I won't be blogging much while we're here. I'll be back at the old stand next Monday. In the meantime, make the most of the usual daily offerings, which will, as always, appear like clockwork.
Posted May 10, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape."
Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6"
Posted May 10, 12:00 AM
May 9, 2010
THE STAR WHO DIDN'T CARE
"Judging by the richness and intensity of Mitchum's best screen performances, Charles Laughton could well have been right when he speculated that the star of The Night of the Hunter might have been worthy of the great classical stage roles. But in Hollywood, serious art is only made by ruthlessly single-minded men who are prepared to go to the wall rather than submit to the pressures of a collaborative process of creation that is founded on compromise--and Robert Mitchum, for all his considerable gifts, was never that kind of man..."Posted May 09, 6:54 PM
May 7, 2010
TT: Try, try again
Today I wrap up the current theater season in New York by covering two revivals, Beth Henley's Family Week and Donald Margulies' Collected Stories. Neither did much for me, though the first is more interesting than the second. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Many playwrights have only one memorable script in them, though they almost always keep on trying to hit the high C a second, third or fourth time. Such, it seems, is the case with Beth Henley, who in 1978 gave us "Crimes of the Heart," which not only won a Pulitzer Prize but deserved it, and has since sought repeatedly and unsuccessfully to write something as good. Now she's gone back to the drawing board. "Family Week," first seen in New York in 2000, has been given an Off-Broadway revival directed by Jonathan Demme and performed this time around in a new version whose revisions, alas, fail to fix an interesting but unsuccessful piece of work....
"Family Week" appears at first glance to be satirizing the foibles of the therapeutic society: "Are you feeling anger towards me?" "I'm feeling distrust, disdain and revulsion." "That would fall into the anger category." But Ms. Henley--or Mr. Demme, who reportedly urged her to revise the play in order to make it more hopeful--proves in the end to be a true believer in the virtues of psychotherapy, which is a perfectly admissible position but doesn't make for compelling theater....
I don't care for the plays of Donald Margulies, but I respect the neatness of his craft. He would never have dreamed of allowing a play as untidy as "Family Week" to make it to the stage--and that's part of the problem with "Collected Stories," which is so tidy as to be enervatingly devoid of surprise.
Stop me if you've heard this one: An aging short-story writer who teaches on the side (Linda Lavin) takes a naïve young student (Sarah Paulson) under her wing. (Stop! Stop!) The teacher shows the protégé the ropes, and the protégé returns the compliment by becoming successful and betraying her mentor, who turns out to be dying of an unspecified disease that leaves her with just enough strength to deliver a furious curtain speech.
You are, perhaps, rolling your eyes? Join the club. Watching "Collected Stories," which was first performed in 1996 and has now made it to Broadway courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club, made me feel like a damsel in distress who'd been tied to the tracks by Snidely Whiplash. I could see the train thundering towards me from miles off, but couldn't get out of the way....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 07, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It is the immemorial dream of the talentless that a sufficient devotion to doctrine will produce art."
David Mamet, Theatre
Posted May 07, 12:00 AM
May 6, 2010
TT: Come on and hear
In case you haven't heard, I'm on my way to downtown Kansas City today, where I'll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Kansas City Public Library. The show starts at six-thirty sharp. Stop by and get your copy of Pops signed--and if you don't own a copy yet, you can buy one there.
For more information, go here.
Posted May 06, 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:
• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 27, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• 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 Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory, closes May 8, reviewed here, here, and here)
Posted May 06, 12:00 AM
TT: Let's dance
Having recently watched Strictly Ballroom for the first time in a decade or so--and having enjoyed it every bit as much as I did in 1993--allow me to share with you one of my favorite pieces of music on the soundtrack, Stanley Black's ultra-obscure recording of "Os Quindins de Ya Ya," which some obliging soul has kindly posted on YouTube:
If you remember the scene in which this recording is heard, you are a true Strictly Ballroom fanatic!
Posted May 06, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"In the great drama we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding."
David Mamet, Theatre
Posted May 06, 12:00 AM
May 5, 2010
TT: Snapshot
A scene from Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted May 05, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The theatre exists to present a contest between good and evil. In both comedy and tragedy, good wins. In drama, it's a tie. In film noir, evil wins."
David Mamet, Theatre
Posted May 05, 12:00 AM
May 4, 2010
TT: Gone legit
A reader writes:
I went this weekend to Trinity College in Hartford to see my daughter in the musical Nine. She is double majoring in music and theatre/dance. I thought you would be interested in knowing that your book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is one of her required textbooks in a course she is taking this semester, "American Popular Music." In fact, she has a paper due on it soon.
I've been in textbooks before, but I've never been one. Cool.
Posted May 04, 12:00 AM
TT: A peep into the past
Readers of Brad Gooch's recent biography of Flannery O'Connor will recall that he describes in the first chapter a 1932 Pathé newsreel in which the five-year-old O'Connor showed off a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The experience, she recalled years later in an essay called "King of the Birds," "marked me for life."
Sad to say, this newsreel has yet to make it to YouTube, but you can view it online by going here.
You will notice, incidentally, that the anonymous author of the program note for this clip, which is available on British Pathé's Web site, clearly doesn't know that the "Mary O'Connor" portrayed in the newsreel is the same person who grew up to be one of America's greatest writers. O tempora!
Posted May 04, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Is Porky Pig, a cartoon, a movie 'persona'? Of course he is. If Cary Grant is a 'person' in the movies, then so is Porky. Grant is an entity who appears only in the movies and doesn't exist in real life. He was drawn up and created by a system that used Archibald Leach as its material. Porky Pig is similarly drawn up--it's just that the raw material was pen and ink, not a guy from Bristol, England."
Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine
Posted May 04, 12:00 AM
May 3, 2010
TT: Down here on a visit
I arrived in Smalltown, U.S.A., yesterday afternoon, and am now contentedly ensconced in the bosom of my family. My brother turned fifty last week, and though I had to miss his surprise party--I was stuck in New York seeing shows--I mean to celebrate the great day belatedly during my brief trip home.
On Thursday I'll be driving up to Kansas City to talk about Pops at the downtown library. The festivities begin with a reception at six p.m., followed a half-hour later by my lecture. Go here for more information if you're in the vicinity and want to come hear me.
On Friday I'll be flying to Chicago for a week of theatergoing, accompanied by Mrs. T and Our Girl.
I'm going to try to blog as often as possible during the first leg of my summer travels, but I'll have to file my usual Wall Street Journal columns from the road, so things may be a bit sparse here from time to time. If that happens, don't worry--I'll be back sooner or later, probably the former.
Posted May 03, 12:00 AM
TT: She's so enlightened
I review the Broadway transfer of Sherie Rene Scott's Everyday Rapture in the New York section of today's Wall Street Journal--and, unlike my colleagues, I wasn't impressed. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
The attractions of "Everyday Rapture" can be summed up in nine words: Ms. Scott is beautiful, sexy and a terrific singer. I loved her in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," and had I seen this show in a cabaret--minus the talk--I might have enjoyed it. Had I paid $116.50 to see it in a Broadway theater, on the other hand, I'd have gone home fuming, not because Ms. Scott sings less well or looks less fetching in front of an audience of 740 but because she has nothing to say that's worth hearing and spends 90 minutes saying it. On the other hand, what Ms. Scott and Dick Scanlan (who co-wrote the book) tell us about her life and thought will be of considerable interest to those wishing to study the point of view of a fortysomething New Yorker who grew up in Kansas, was raised as a member of a fundamentalist religious sect, shook the prairie dirt from her feet as fast as she could and now looks back on her childhood and youth with a contempt that she fails to disguise as amused tolerance.
I may possibly be doing Ms. Scott a disservice, since the "Sherie Rene Scott" whom she plays in "Everyday Rapture" is a metafictional character who tells stories about her "past" that she and Mr. Scanlan may or may not have made up. "Only some are factual," she says. "But all are true." On the other hand, Ms. Scott's coyness about the facts of her real life does nothing to conceal her feelings about the culture that she describes in "Everyday Rapture." It was, to hear her tell it, a sewer of art-hating homophobes whose failure to share Ms. Scott's appreciation for the genius of Judy Garland ("Torn between two lovers--Jesus and Judy") was almost as odious as their belief that all homosexuals are headed for the hottest corner of hell. Somehow I doubt that absolutely everybody in Kansas feels that way, but Ms. Scott doesn't seem to have met anyone there (except for her gay cousin) who begged to differ.
The trouble with "Everyday Rapture" is not its implicit belief system--I'm as much of a humanist as the next theater-loving Upper West Side aesthete--but the preening condescension with which Ms. Scott and her collaborator portray her own steady ascent to the heights of greeting-card enlightenment...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted May 03, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews."
P.J. O'Rourke, "A Plague of 'A Students" (The Weekly Standard, May 3, 2010)
Posted May 03, 12:00 AM