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June 30, 2010

TT: Snapshot

Helen Frankenthaler paints and talks about her work:

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

Posted June 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Where in the world are Terry and Mrs. T?

Right here--though things have changed a bit since 1920:

Posted June 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Understanding somebody else's filing system is just about as easy as really getting to know another human being. Just when you think you know everything about them, there's the impossible happening, the M for Miscellaneous when you naturally assumed it would be under something else."

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

Posted June 30, 12:00 AM

June 29, 2010

TT: One for the road

In honor of my imminent departure on a theater-related road trip, here's one of the most festive pieces of music I know, Emmanuel Chabrier's Bourrée fantasque, played by Robert Casadesus:

See you around!

Posted June 29, 10:27 AM

TT: Almanac

"After all, life isn't really so unpleasant as some writers make out, is it?" she added hopefully.

"No, perhaps not. It's comic and sad and indefinite--dull, sometimes, but seldom really tragic or deliriously happy, except when one's very young."

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

UPDATE: A friend writes: "I said at the time that reading Barbara Pym made me want to go off and join a motorcycle gang, and that quote reminds me of why."

Posted June 29, 12:00 AM

June 28, 2010

TT: Multiculturalism exemplified

I'm posting this video because (A) I adore the music of Emmanuel Chabrier and (B) it's really funny. Not to mention kind of cool:

Posted June 28, 8:22 AM

TT: Buffalo gal comes out

In the Greater New York section of today's Wall Street Journal, I review the world premiere of The Grand Manner, a new play by A.R. Gurney. It's a winner. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Like many other prolific artists, A.R. Gurney is unpredictably uneven. Some of his plays are concentrated and involving, others agreeable but slack, and the only way to know which kind you're going to get is to show up and find out for yourself.

When I heard that Mr. Gurney's latest play was a backstage fantasy about a youthful encounter with Katharine Cornell, I figured it would be one of his lesser efforts, a slightly sticky valentine to the actress whom Alexander Woollcott dubbed "the First Lady of the Theater." Not so. "The Grand Manner" starts out heavy on the charm, but Mr. Gurney pulls a switch on you, and all at once you realize that you're seeing an unexpectedly tough-minded portrait of an exceedingly complicated marriage.

Few now remember Cornell, who retired from the stage in 1961, for she appeared in only one Hollywood film, "Stage Door Canteen," preferring instead to act on Broadway and on the road with her touring company. Fewer still remember Guthrie McClintic, her husband, who directed the plays in which she acted. Most well-informed theater buffs know that both Cornell and McClintic were homosexual, but they took care to keep their private lives private, and so next to nothing is known about the exact nature of their relationship....

Mr. Gurney met Cornell briefly in her dressing room after a 1948 performance of "Antony and Cleopatra." He was a stage-struck 18-year-old who, like her, came from Buffalo, N.Y., and nothing much happened beyond the mere fact of their meeting, which is portrayed more or less accurately by Bobby Steggert and Kate Burton in the first scene of "The Grand Manner." Then Mr. Gurney backs up, starts over and spins an elaborately fictionalized version of the encounter, one in which he not only meets Cornell, the flamboyantly foul-mouthed McClintic (Boyd Gaines) and Gertrude Macy (Brenda Wehle), Cornell's hard-nosed business manager and offstage lover, but looks on in amazement as the members of this oddly sorted ménage à trois drop their masks of propriety and share with him their inmost hopes and fears....

The fact that Cornell, McClintic and Macy parade their sexual heterodoxies instead of hinting discreetly at them gives "The Grand Manner" an air of contrivance that lessens its believability. This is more than a quibble, but I hasten to add that it does little to diminish the play's sheer effectiveness, especially in so excellent a production....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Here's a video of Katharine Cornell's appearance in Stage Door Canteen, directed by Frank Borzage and released in 1943:

Posted June 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges. His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character--only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art."

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (courtesy of Lance Mannion)

Posted June 28, 12:00 AM

June 25, 2010

TT: Too complicated for words

It's become chic in literary circles to celebrate June 16 as Bloomsday, the date on which the events chronicled in James Joyce's Ulysses supposedly took place in Dublin. But celebrations notwithstanding, the fact remains that Ulysses is more admired than read--and that Finnegans Wake, Joyce's other major novel, isn't even read. Few people are prepared to grapple with its fantastic verbal complications, any more than they're prepared to grapple with the musical hypercomplexities of an exercise in atonal modernism like Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître.

I thought of Joyce at once when a musician friend drew my attention the other day to a 1988 paper by Fred Lerdahl called Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems. Lerdahl, a tonal composer who has studied cognitive psychology, believes that certain kinds of modern music are too complicated for the human brain to process, and will therefore never find an audience. It immediately occurred to me when I read his paper that the same inborn limitations on intelligibility might apply to practitioners of other art forms--and no sooner did I come to that conclusion than I felt the first stirrings of a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal.

Are our brains simply not big enough to process the prose of Joyce or the music of Boulez? And if not, then why have such similarly complex artistic creations as the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock succeeded in finding an appreciative popular audience? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

* * *

James Joyce reads an excerpt from Finnegans Wake:

Posted June 25, 10:04 AM

TT: In love with She Loves Me

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two more shows from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, She Loves Me and The Merchant of Venice. I was thrilled by one but didn't warm up to the other. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

For a cult show, "She Loves Me" sure gets done a lot. I know of two revivals taking place this year, one which closed last month at Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse and another that runs through October at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I expect there are others of which I haven't heard. I trust they're all worthy, but the OSF production of "She Loves Me," directed by Rebecca Taichman, is special in every way, a near-flawless realization of one of the most delightful musicals of the 20th century.

First seen on Broadway in 1963, "She Loves Me" is based on "The Shop Around the Corner," Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 screen version of "Parfumerie," a Miklós Laszló stage comedy that was later filmed as "In the Good Old Summertime" and "You've Got Mail." The setting is prewar Budapest and the plot is a clockwork farce: Amalia and Georg, two love-starved members of what used to be called a "lonelyhearts club," are sending each another anonymous mash notes without ever having met....

The word "endearing" can sound saccharine, but it fits "She Loves Me" as tightly as the skin on an apple, and one reason why this revival is so easy to love is the way in which it is cast. Instead of picking a pair of pretty-pretty stars, Ms. Taichman has gone in a different direction: Georg is played by Mark Bedard, who is balding, bespectacled and sharp-faced, while Lisa McCormick, who plays Amalia, is an eagerly fluttering sparrow who is charming but not glamorous. You don't have to strain to see the two of them as a pair of wallflowers who make each other blossom....

Ms. Taichman is best known to New York theatergoers for her staging of the 2007 Off Broadway premiere of Theresa Rebeck's "The Scene." I had no idea that she would be similarly adept in musical comedy, but her collaboration with choreographer John Carrafa (who staged the musical numbers for the original production of "Urinetown") is seamless and scintillating. Songs and dialogue are woven together indissolubly, and each scene is played not for laughs but for truth--which means that the laughter comes from the heart....

Everybody wants to do "The Merchant of Venice," but few directors are prepared to grapple forthrightly with the play's gnarly side. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new production, staged by Bill Rauch and performed in the company's Elizabethan-style outdoor theater, leaves nothing to be desired in this respect: It abounds with racial stereotypes, all of which are presented unapologetically. The staging is full of sharp comic twists, and one of the performances, that of Anthony Heald as Shylock, is impressively pointed and lively. Yet the divine spark is missing...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."

George Santayana, "Reason in Ethics"

Posted June 25, 12:00 AM

June 24, 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)
• 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)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through Aug. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Annie Get Your Gun (musical, G, child-friendly, closes July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PHILADELPHIA:
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, far too complex for children, closes July 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

Posted June 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Posted June 24, 12:00 AM

June 23, 2010

TT: Snapshot

A performance of Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring, choreographed in 1944 and filmed in 1959 by Peter Glushanok. The score is by Aaron Copland and the set is by Isamu Noguchi. Graham dances the role of the Bride:

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

Posted June 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis"

Posted June 23, 12:00 AM

June 22, 2010

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

A couple enjoyable things:

• Tom & Lorenzo's series on the fashion of "Mad Men", a detailed look at the costumes of the different characters. If I were costume designer Janie Bryant I'd be over the moon about it -- they are picking up everything she is laying down.

• Another bookmark: Schott's Vocab blog, which is doling out a "lexicographical trifle" a day with an assist from the OED. Elsewhere on the word geekery front, I love this Language Log theory that pegs basketball player Manute Bol as the originator of the phrase "my bad." Also: Team Snuck. (More here.)

Posted June 22, 12:20 PM

TT: Almanac

"My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw--which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker."

Nigel Rees, Sayings of the Century

Posted June 22, 12:00 AM

June 21, 2010

TT: Almanac

"I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better."

Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children"

Posted June 21, 12:00 AM

June 18, 2010

TT: Hamlet the hipster

I'll be writing about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this week and next in my Wall Street Journal drama column. Today I review two sharply contrasting shows, Hamlet and the West Coast premiere of Lynn Nottage's Ruined, both of which are outstanding. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

The first rule of theater is that there are no rules--other than not to be dull. Practice always trumps theory onstage, and nearly anything, no matter how absurd it may seem, can be made to work if it's charged with conviction. Experience has taught me that lesson time and again, but I can still be taken by surprise when a show about which I'm understandably skeptical ends up being terrific. That happened with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new "Hamlet," which looked trendy on paper but turned out to be immensely exciting.

Bill Rauch, the festival's artistic director, goes in for up-to-the-second ideas, and his modern-dress staging of "Hamlet" is full of them. The setting is a contemporary castle equipped with swiveling security cameras and beefy guards who brandish assault weapons. Hamlet (Dan Donohue) is a flippant hipster decked out in sunglasses and skinny tie. Claudius (Jeffrey King) is a glib glad-hander who looks like Daddy Warbucks. Polonius (Richard Elmore) is the clueless father of a sitcom-style family. The Player King (Ramiz Monsef) is a rapper and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Vilma Silva and Jeany Park) are a cute lesbian couple.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? Well, stop it. Mr. Rauch's "Hamlet" may sound like a cornucopia of postmodern clichés, but no sooner does it get moving than you find yourself swept up in the momentum of a show that makes compulsive sense. Every scene is shaped with easy authority and every line, even "To be or not to be," is read with a freshness and snap that make it new. It helps--a lot--that the acting is so consistently strong, especially that of Mr. Donohue, who plays Hamlet as a soft-spoken, bristlingly intelligent neurotic who stoops to cheap irony because the situation in which he finds himself would otherwise be too hurtful to bear. But it is the directorial choices that give point to the performances of the cast...

Lynn Nottage and Oregon Shakespeare have close ties. In 2006 the company presented one of the first regional productions of "Intimate Apparel," the Pulitzer-winning play that opened the eyes of many American theatergoers (myself among them) to Ms. Nottage's great gifts. Now it's giving the West Coast premiere of "Ruined," her portrayal of the monstrous war of all against all that has consumed a generation of Congolese women....

Kate Whoriskey, who directed the original production of "Ruined," is remounting it next month at Seattle's Intiman Theatre. While I saw Ms. Whoriskey's version Off Broadway in 2009 and was as impressed as it's possible to be, OSF's production, directed by Liesl Tommy on a three-quarter-round stage, is closely comparable in effect....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

Henry David Thoreau, journal entry (Aug. 19, 1851)

Posted June 18, 12:00 AM

June 17, 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)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Annie Get Your Gun (musical, G, child-friendly, closes July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN PHILADELPHIA:
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, far too complex for children, closes July 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, closes June 27, reviewed here)

Posted June 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"As well as a native, half-knavish wit, his was that careful mean shrewdness by which alone a man can climb, not too visibly soiled, through the sewer-like lower labyrinth of American politics."

James Gould Cozzens, The Last Adam

Posted June 17, 12:00 AM

June 16, 2010

TT: Jonathan Wolken, R.I.P.

I've been a fan of Pilobolus Dance Theatre ever since I started to look at the dance, and my admiration deepened when I began writing about ballet and modern dance in 1990. From then on I had frequent occasion to write about Pilobolus, whose unique brand of theatrical trompe l'oeil is easy to describe but hard to explain, as I rediscovered time and again during my tenure as dance critic of the New York Daily News:

The lights go down, the curtain goes up, and six half-clothed dancers come running on stage and immediately start tying themselves into exotic knots and strange, almost-familiar shapes. Are you dreaming? Are you trapped inside a surrealist painting? No, you're just watching Pilobolus Dance Theatre, a group so witty and imaginative that it has flourished for a quarter-century...

Pilobolus Dance Theatre is among the most popular and successful companies in the history of American dance. The members of Pilobolus have twisted themselves into indescribably kinky knots everywhere from the Edinburgh Festival to The Tonight Show and Sesame Street, accompanied by everything from bluegrass and rap to Corelli and Carmina Burana. Their wry, often light-hearted style--an eye-popping combination of dance, gymnastics and performance art--appeals not just to modern-dance buffs but to audiences of all kinds.

I got to know Jonathan Wolken, one of the group's founders, when I spent a couple of days watching Pilobolus audition new dancers at New York's City Center, then wrote a piece for the New York Times about the experience. We hit it off, and a year later Jonathan and his colleagues allowed me to be a fly on the wall as they created a new dance in collaboration with Maurice Sendak. That unforgettable experience led not only to another piece for the Times, but to my appearing in Last Dance, Mirra Banks' 2002 documentary about the creation of A Selection, the Pilobolus-Sendak dance that I'd seen being made three years earlier.

I never got to know Jonathan more than casually--he was prickly and self-possessed in a way that I found intimidating--but I liked and admired him and was always pleased to chat with him about Pilobolus and its doings whenever the group was in town for one of its summer seasons at the Joyce Theater. Alas, the demands of my work as a drama critic forced me to spend less time attending dance performances, and so I was taken completely by surprise when I learned last night that Jonathan had died at the absurdly untimely age of sixty.

I find it hard to grasp that one of the founding members of a performing ensemble that has long been so much a part of my aesthetic life is no longer with us. The good news--if you can call it that--is that the dances that Jonathan helped to create, like Pilobolus itself, will survive him for a very long time to come. Even so, his death tears a hole in the world, one that for me is larger still because he was only six years my senior. I always thought of Jonathan Wolken as an elder statesman of dance. Somehow it never occurred to me that a mere half-generation separated us. The not-so-old order passeth....

* * *

Jonathan's New York Times obituary is here.

Posted June 16, 9:03 AM

TT: Snapshot

Patricia Neway sings "To this we've come" in a 1960 telecast of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul, conducted by Werner Torkanowsky. Neway created the role of Magda Sorel in the opera's original 1950 Broadway production:

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

Posted June 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence. The least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of."

Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, Oct. 28, 1815

Posted June 16, 12:00 AM

June 15, 2010

TT: Gentlemen, start your engines

Paul Moravec and I are now at work on our second opera--but don't call it that!

The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which gets underway on April 1, 2011, is a citywide venture that will encompass the premieres of thirty-one works intended to capture "the inventive, no-holds-barred spirit of Paris: 1910-1920, the inspiration and theme of the 25-day festival." Center City Opera Theater is contributing to the festivities with a program that will pair Renard, a rarely produced one-act chamber opera composed in 1916 by Igor Stravinsky, with a new work written for the same performing forces as Renard, four male singers (two tenors, a baritone, and a bass-baritone) and a small instrumental ensemble.

Andrew Kurtz, who runs Center City Opera, invited Paul and me to write a companion piece to Renard. I came up with the idea of a backstage farce about the creation of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The title is Danse Russe. The four characters, whose real-life models are pictured above, are:

• Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, who commissioned The Rite of Spring

• Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev's lover and star dancer, who choreographed the ballet

• Pierre Monteux, who conducted the first performance

• Stravinsky himself

Unlike The Letter, our previous collaboration, Danse Russe is a knockabout comedy with spoken dialogue. We're calling it a "vaudeville," and we expect it to play more like a musical than an opera. I finished the first draft of the libretto three weeks ago, and Paul started writing the music last week.

We open in Philadelphia on April 15--and yes, I'll be blogging with steadily increasing frequency about the making of Danse Russe between now and then.

More as it happens.

Posted June 15, 7:46 PM

CAAF: Your ex-girlfriend gives it one year, tops

I'm amused by this pen and ink sketch of Lord and Lady Byron shortly after their marriage. It was drawn by Lady Caroline Lamb, who had carried on an affair with the poet before being thrown over a few years before (it was Lamb who called Bryon "mad, bad and dangerous to know"). As with the couple's correspondence about religion, it's an early signal that the marriage was headed for a spectacular flame-out. Lamb was hardly objective of course, but look at that body language!

The sketches Lamb kept in her journals have real wit and charm. But the novel she later wrote about Byron, Glenarvon, is wonderfully terrible. I'm reading it right now and it's like slogging through a juvenile Bronte effort with all the trotting around moonlit ruins and character names like Calantha, the Duchess of Altamonte and Sir Everard St. Clare. Sample:

At this very period of time, in the prosecution of her sudden and accursed designs, having bade adieu to brighter climes and more polished manners, with all the gaiety of apparent innocence, and all the brilliancy of wit which belongs to spirits light as air and a refined and highly cultivated genius, she was sailing, accompanied by a train of admirers, selected from the flower of Italy, once again to visit her native country.

That does sound fancy, doesn't it? And evil. I wish Lamb had done the book as a graphic novel instead.

(Sketch scanned from Fiona MacCarthy's very good Bryon: Life and Legend.)

Posted June 15, 12:48 PM

TT: Almanac

"A man's hope measures his civilization."

Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur

Posted June 15, 12:00 AM

June 14, 2010

TT: Perpetual motion

The summer has started in earnest, and Mrs. T and I depart the East Coast yet again today. This time we'll be en route to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I for the third time, she for the first. We'll be seeing four shows during our week-long stay, and you'll read about them in my Wall Street Journal drama column, where I'll be reviewing the festival for two weeks running.

I expect we'll find time to do some other things as well, and you'll get to read about those in this space sooner or later. Don't ask which, though!

Posted June 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Not for gazillionaires only

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong has turned up on a fair number of best-of lists since it came out late last year, but the latest of these appearances is undoubtedly the one that tickles me most. J.P. Morgan Private Bank, which caters to individuals of "ultra high net worth," distributes a summer reading list to its billionaire clients--and Pops, to my jaw-dropping astonishment, made this year's list.

Says J.P. Morgan's Web site:

Since its inception, the J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List has been designed to resonate with the diverse passions of our clients across the globe. As the list marks its second decade, we have once again created a collection of 10 nonfiction titles from among the 450 nominated by our offices worldwide--a selection that taps into today's compelling issues, personalities and cultural highlights. Whether you seek insightful biographies, chronicles of companies transforming our lives, an up-close look at the financial crisis, or artful works to pique your senses, we think our recommendations will intrigue you. Enjoy.

To see the entire list, go here.

Oh, yes--I accept cash.

Posted June 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."

Francis Bacon, Apophthegms

Posted June 14, 12:00 AM

June 13, 2010

THE ZERO OPTION

Posted June 13, 9:14 PM

June 11, 2010

TT: A musical musical

No sooner did I return from my vacation than I hit the road again. Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to reviews of two out-of-town musicals, Sunday in the Park with George in Philadelphia and Annie Get Your Gun in Connecticut. Both are top-notch, must-see shows. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

For all the prodigal virtuosity of his wordplay, Stephen Sondheim is first and foremost a composer. It is his music that makes his shows unique, and it troubles me that so many of the small-scale Sondheim revivals to come along in recent seasons have fallen down on the musical job. Not so the Arden Theatre Company's sterling mounting of "Sunday in the Park with George," in which Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine spin a tale of love, loss and artistic commitment out of the creation of "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," Georges Seurat's 1886 pointillist masterpiece. Not only is this production sensitively staged and imaginatively designed, but it's the best-sung Sondheim revival to come along in years--and it makes use of Michael Starobin's ear-caressingly iridescent original 1984 orchestrations, which are among the finest ever to be created for a Broadway show.

The program gives joint credit for the concept of this production to Terrence J. Nolen, the director, and Jorge Cousineau, who created the video projections that bring "Sunday in the Park with George" to arresting visual life. On a stage designed by James Kronzer to look like a triple-matted print hanging in an art gallery, we see the sketches from Seurat's notebooks on which "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was based, along with countless other striking effects. What is most impressive, though, is that none of these effects is ever allowed to get between the actors and the audience: Instead of overwhelming the show, they serve it....

No two musicals could be more unalike than "Sunday in the Park with George" and Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun," a make-way-for-Merman blockbuster with a score that piles hit atop hit and a charmingly cartoonish book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields that is as child-friendly as a sandbox on a sunny day. Now Goodspeed Musicals is putting on this well-loved show as a vehicle for Jenn Gambatese, who made a splash in "All Shook Up" and "Tarzan" but has yet to emerge as a name-above-the-title musical-comedy star. If Rob Ruggiero's terrific production were running on Broadway, it'd surely do the trick: Ms. Gambatese has a platinum-plated voice and a smile warm enough to sell tickets all by itself, and she plays Annie Oakley, the sharp-shooting backwoods gal who cain't get a man with a gun, with an affecting blend of brassy boldness and unexpected vulnerability. This is the kind of performance on which whole careers are built....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 11, 12:00 AM

TT: The zero option

The Pasadena Symphony is the latest regional orchestra to get itself into financial hot water. It won't be the last. So many second- and third-tier American orchestras are currently struggling to survive that I've been asking myself, not for the first time, whether such institutions may possibly have outlived their artistic usefulness. Do regional orchestras make artistic sense now that the ubiquity of downloadable digital music has rendered obsolete their historic function of bringing classical-music masterpieces to smaller communities? Or can these floundering ensembles be successfully "repurposed" for the twenty-first century?

These tough questions are the subject of my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. If, like me, you wonder whether and why regional orchestras ought to be saved, pick up a copy of Saturday's paper and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"He that lives upon Hope will die fasting."

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

Posted June 11, 12:00 AM

June 10, 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)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through July 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, closes June 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, reviewed here)

Posted June 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction."

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 58 (May 16, 1759)

Posted June 10, 12:00 AM

June 9, 2010

TT: Snapshot

An interview with Erroll Garner:

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

Posted June 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Isn't, didn't, don't

I long ago gave up trying to tell jazz musicians, journalists, and bloggers that I have never written, nor do I believe, that "jazz is dead." You will search this column in vain for the words "dead," "death," or "dying."

Alas, most of the people who commented on what I wrote in The Wall Street Journal last August either didn't read my original column or misunderstood what it said. I'm not sure into which pigeonhole the founders of the 2010 NYC Undead Jazzfest should be inserted. I am, however, amused to have had an entire jazz festival named after something that the founders of the festival mistakenly believe that I wrote, and I wish them the very best of luck.

In the meantime, I direct your attention to this Village Voice story about Woody Allen's parallel career as a jazz clarinetist, and in particular to this part of the story:

"If God plays the baddest saxophone solo ever played in the woods, and nobody hears it, did He make a sound?" asks Jazz at Lincoln Center curator Phil Schaap, Charlie Parker audible in the background. Host of the so-themed "Bird Flight" hour on Columbia University's WKCR radio--and, owing to both its unbroken 29-year weekday run and his inexhaustible scholarship of all jazz, the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile in 2008--Schaap is a stern critic of the jazz community's short-sighted direction of its resources. The Juilliard professor maintains that what scant funding remains is being funneled into performance studies while ignoring the substantial problem of how to fill the seats offstage, which is "fool's gold at best."

"There's no audience development--none--in the jazz-education system, yet they're turning out would-be professionals in the low four figures annually, and it can't work," says Schaap, 59. "It's a train wreck. The jazz community is a shrinking one, and part of this that is most glaring is with the young. If something isn't done, then the music will be further marginalized to the point where I'm not quite sure how it will survive."

Indeed, jazz audiences are skewing much older and scarcer than before. A National Endowment for the Arts survey showed that the median age for American adults who attended a jazz concert in 1982 was 29. In 2008, that median age had risen to 46. More alarmingly, the Recording Industry Association of America reported jazz sales to make up just 1.1 percent of all music sales in 2008 (the most current available stats), a precipitous drop from the decade high of 3.4 percent in 2001.

The overarching implication: Jazz is showing a dangerous lack of renewability with future generations, and what is not heard is not preserved. New York, while still a slightly stronger jazz microcosm than the country at large, exhibits the same warning signs: a shrinking number of venues, a lack of mainstream exposure to entice new audiences, and a splintered community of performers fighting stylistically among themselves. Clearly, the jazz community here is worried; many participants have a fatalistic spin Woody Allen could appreciate.

"I think jazz in general is about to die off," says Spike Wilner, owner of Small's jazz club in the West Village and himself a traditional-leaning stride pianist. "The most important thing is: You don't have, at all, the venues you used to have....Young audiences aren't exposed to jazz early on anymore when there's no place for them to discover it. Where are they gonna discover jazz? It's not taught in their schools; you're not able to find it on the radio. They're not gonna stumble upon it."

Sound familiar? It should. I can't tell you how many jazz musicians of all ages--many of them famous--have said exactly the same things to me.

Not surprisingly, my Wall Street Journal column goes unmentioned in the Village Voice story. Nevertheless, the whole piece is worth reading.

Posted June 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Posted June 09, 12:00 AM

June 8, 2010

TT: If you wrote to me...

...about a photograph purporting to be of the young Louis Armstrong, please send your e-mail a second time. I inadvertently deleted it from my mailbox before replying and no longer have your return address. Apologies!

Posted June 08, 10:35 AM

CAAF: Perspective, with Lord Byron

From a letter to Annabella Milbanke, the to-be Lady Byron, written in 1815:

I thank you very much for your suggestions on Religion - but I must tell you at the hazard of losing whatever good opinion your gentleness may have bestowed upon me - that it is a source from which I never did - & I believe never can derive comfort... why I came here - I know not - where I shall go it is useless to enquire - in the midst of myriads of the living & the dead worlds - stars - systems - infinity - why should I be anxious about an atom?

Posted June 08, 12:06 AM

CAAF: Let them do their worst

It is muggy in Asheville. Thunderstorms daily. This weekend we bought a bag of birdseed for the birdfeeder in the backyard. The birdfeeder's been there since we moved in; a super-ugly structure, like a miniature, maroonish Brady Bunch house stuck on a high narrow pole, cemented into place. We scraped off seven years of cobwebs and filled it. About two hours later, a squirrel climbed up it, the pole broke, and the birdfeeder, seed and squirrel came tumbling down. Squirrel last seen riding off into the sunset, belching Eastern songbird mix.

My other weekend purchase was two books, Louise Glück's Wild Iris and David Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Here's a bit of Glück for you, from one of her "Matins" poems, middle removed:

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way. Much
has passed between us. Or
was it always only
on the one side?
...
... I might as well go on
addressing the birches,
as in my former life: let them
do their worst, let them
bury me with the Romantics,
their pointed yellow leaves
falling and covering me.

Posted June 08, 12:05 AM

TT: Almanac

"All I know for sure is that so far as I have been able to determine, nothing you can possibly imagine is impossible. Somebody's doing it or is going to do it. That goes for the good as well as the bad."

James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific

Posted June 08, 12:00 AM

June 7, 2010

TT: Nowhere to be found (I)

Having been put through the wringer by an unexpected siege of illness, Mrs. T and I were profoundly grateful when the doctors cut her loose two weeks ago and gave their blessing to our long-planned, much-needed vacation. I was so careworn that I succumbed to a case of stress-related bronchitis a day or two before we hit the road, but I managed to enjoy myself anyway and got enough rest to shake it off well before the clock ran out.

We made three stops along the way:

• As part of our long-term project of staying at all six of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses that can be rented for overnight stays, we launched our vacation by flying to Pittsburgh and driving from there to Polymath Park, the rural resort to which Wright's Duncan House, which was previously to be found in Illinois, was moved in 2002, just ahead of the wrecker's ball.

The Duncan house is one of a group of prefabricated houses designed by Wright and manufactured by Marshall Erdman that were built in the Fifties. (Another Wright prefab is located in Staten Island.) It's the only one open to the public, so this was our first chance to get a look at what Wright had in mind when in 1955 he started to design a house that, unlike any of his earlier residences, would be suitable for mass construction.

Most of the Erdman prefabs are single-story ranch-style houses that range in size from 1,860 to 2,400 square feet. When you bought one, you got the house itself: walls, floors, windows, doors, cabinets, woodwork. You supplied the lot and foundation, plus plumbing, heating, wiring, paint, and labor. Unlike the custom-designed Usonian houses that were Wright's first full-scale attempt at creating housing for the American middle class, the Erdman prefabs have very simple interiors that lack the arrestingly elegant detail of the other Wright houses in which Mrs. T and I have stayed. This, however, makes it possible to see the spine of the architectural design more clearly, and in so doing to realize just how much it contributes to the house's total effect. Time and again I've found that it's restful to spend the night in a Wright house. The interiors are so spacious and uncluttered, and so perfectly integrated with their outdoor surroundings, that they create an uncanny feeling of tranquility in their occupants. The Duncan House is no exception: if you don't sleep well there, you won't sleep well anywhere.

The Erdman prefabs, which were originally intended to sell for $15,000, should have taken American homebuyers by storm. But like so many of Wright's projects, they ended up costing far more than expected. The turnkey cost of a Wright prefab was roughly fifty thousand dollars, the equivalent of $377,000 today, and some cost far more than that. (The total cost of the Wright prefab on Staten Island, including lot, installation charges, and "extras," was $100,000 in 1957 dollars.) As a result, the enlightened-but-not-wealthy people to whom Erdman pitched them failed to materialize, and only eleven were built. Fortunately, all eleven prefabs are still standing, and anyone with a serious interest in Wright's work should make every effort to spend a couple of nights in this one.

Nearly everyone who stays in Duncan House does so in order to tour Fallingwater, which is thirty miles away. Needless to say, Mrs. T and I did so as well, she for the second time and I for the third, and we found the experience as engrossing as ever. I blogged at length about Fallingwater in 2003, so this time around I'll simply say that the more often you visit the house, the more powerful is its attraction. I wish I could go there four times a year and spend a whole day each time.

(First of two parts)

Posted June 07, 9:35 AM

TT: All fresh and new

The right-hand column is full of new picks and links. I posted them a few days ago but forgot to pass the word! If you didn't notice, I have two pieces of advice: look and click.

Posted June 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted June 07, 12:00 AM

June 5, 2010

MP3

Posted June 05, 5:11 PM

June 4, 2010

TT: No, they didn't fire me

In case you're wondering why there's no Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser today, the reason is both simple and benign: I'm still on my much-needed vacation.

I'll be doing business at the same old stand next week. See you then!

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221B Baker Street and didn't find him."

Rex Stout (quoted in Mark Van Doren, The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times)

Posted June 04, 12:00 AM

June 3, 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)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)
• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare/Neil LaBute, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine (satire, G, not easily accessible to children, reviewed here)

Posted June 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do--and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they've taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can't understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don't have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. "

Ray Bradbury, interviewed by Sam Weller (The Paris Review, Spring 2010, courtesy of Parabasis)

Posted June 03, 12:00 AM

June 2, 2010

TT: Snapshot

The Count Basie Orchestra plays "Dance of the Gremlins" and "Swingin' the Blues" in 1941, with Don Byas on tenor, Harry Edison on trumpet, and Jo Jones on drums:

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

Posted June 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Posted June 02, 12:00 AM

June 1, 2010

THE IRRELEVANT MASTERPIECE

Posted June 01, 10:37 AM

TT: Almanac

"It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Posted June 01, 12:00 AM