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September 30, 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, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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 Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN LOS ANGELES:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here)
Posted September 30, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman."
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, journal entry, July 1858
Posted September 30, 12:00 AM
September 29, 2010
PLENTY OF NOTHING
"Who deserves to be considered America's most significant classical composer? Concertgoers of a certain age will doubtless choose Aaron Copland or George Gershwin, the creators of the first distinctively American-sounding styles of classical composition, while more contemporary listeners are more likely to cite Philip Glass or John Adams, who made minimalism the dominant classical-music idiom of the postwar era. But if 'significant' is taken to mean 'influential,' then a strong, if seemingly paradoxical, case can be made for a composer who, for all the undeniable influence he has exerted on American music, failed to write even one work that has made its way into the repertoires of any well-known orchestra, opera company, chamber group, singer, or instrumentalist..."Posted September 29, 4:54 PM
TT: Snapshot
Ginette Neveu plays the coda of Ernest Chausson's Poème:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted September 29, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It is uplifting to lose one's faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper."
Karl Kraus, "In Praise of a Topsy-Turvy Lifestyle"
Posted September 29, 12:00 AM
September 28, 2010
TT: Well spent
I've had some sharp things to say in the past about the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants," so I am entirely delighted to report that David Cromer, the greatest American stage director of his generation, and David Simon, the creator of Homicide, The Wire, and Treme, have both received MacArthur fellowships.
I'm especially pleased about Cromer because of the role that my Wall Street Journal drama columns, in particular this 2008 piece, have played in bringing his work to the attention of a national audience. So far as I know, I'm the first person ever to have described him as a "genius" in print, in my review of his extraordinary production of Our Town. Of all the useful things that a critic can hope to do in the course of his career, few are more gratifying than ringing the bell of acclaim for an artist deserving of much wider recognition, then looking on from the sidelines as he receives it.
I am enormously proud of having written with enthusiasm in The Wall Street Journal about Diana Krall and Maria Schneider long before they became widely known. Now it is my privilege to add David Cromer to that list. I hope his name won't be the last one on it.
Posted September 28, 7:16 AM
TT: Almanac
"News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off."
Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind
Posted September 28, 12:00 AM
September 27, 2010
TT: On the move
I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks. Watch this space for occasional reports, plus the usual almanac entries, videos, and theater-related postings. CAAF and Our Girl have also promised to show their faces.
Next stop, LaGuardia Airport!
Posted September 27, 12:35 AM
TT: Almanac
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation."
George Bernard Shaw, preface to Too True to Be Good
Posted September 27, 12:00 AM
September 24, 2010
TT: At, not with
In today's Wall Street Journal I report from Boston on the Huntington Theatre Company's new revival of William Inge's Bus Stop, about which I had sharply mixed feelings. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Boston's Huntington Theatre Company has revived "Bus Stop" in a production staged by Nicholas Martin, whose 2007 Huntington revival of Noël Coward's "Present Laughter" moved to Broadway last season. I doubt that his "Bus Stop" will meet with the same good fortune, not because it doesn't work on its own terms but because Mr. Martin's staging, though undeniably effective, is false to the play's nature. Inge called "Bus Stop" a comedy, and it contains more than enough funny moments to justify the label. But "Bus Stop" is a serious comedy, one in which pathos is never far from the surface, and Mr. Martin has chosen to direct the first two acts for laughter instead of truth. The result is a production that too often encourages the audience to laugh at the characters instead of with them, which diminishes both the characters and the play.
If you've never seen "Bus Stop," it's a "Grand Hotel"-like tale of a group of travelers who get caught in a blizzard and are forced to spend the night holed up in a small-town diner somewhere in Kansas. As they interact with three of the town's residents and with one another, we gradually get to know the characters, all of whom are looking for love. One of them, Bo (Noah Bean), is a sexually inexperienced young cowboy who has fallen for Cherie (Nicole Rodenburg), a shopworn nightclub singer, and is trying to persuade her to come home to Montana with him. Also on hand are Virgil (Stephen Lee Anderson), Bo's longtime sidekick; Grace (Karen MacDonald), the hard-bitten owner of the diner, who longs to lure the bus driver (Will LeBow) into the sack; Elma (Ronete Levenson), a bright but innocent teenager who waits tables for Grace and catches the eye of Dr. Lyman (Henry Stram), a Shakespeare-spouting drunk with an ugly penchant for chasing underage girls; and Will (Adam LeFevre), the town sheriff, a quiet gent who is tougher than he looks.
We are, in short, deep in the heart of Cliché Country--except that Inge writes about his eight stock-company characters with a compassionate and comprehending sympathy that makes each one seem as real as your next-door neighbor. This is where Mr. Martin goes wrong, for he has all too clearly encouraged the key members of the cast to overplay their parts, opting for broad caricature instead of laconic understatement (except in the last act, where the actors finally get in tune with the play and bring it to a satisfying close). It's as though he doesn't trust the audience to know when to be amused....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 24, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
A sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall"
Posted September 24, 12:00 AM
September 23, 2010
TT: Yes, Virginia, another Pops interview...
...but this one, if I do say so myself, is unusually interesting. Lee Mergner, the editor-in-chief of JazzTimes, interviewed me via e-mail a couple of months ago about the writing of Pops, and his questions were both wide-ranging and astute:
How do you avoid hagiography with a subject so remarkable as Armstrong?By telling the truth about him. Louis Armstrong was a great and lovable man, but he wasn't a saint, and he wouldn't have wanted to be portrayed as one. That's something he makes clear in his own autobiographical writings. It was immensely important to Armstrong to make sure that posterity would know the whole truth about him. That's why he took care to preserve his personal papers, and why he spent so much time writing the letters and manuscripts in which he told his side of the story of his life. He wasn't afraid of telling the truth about himself, and that inspired me to do the same.
The interview has just been posted on the magazine's Web site and you can read it here.
Posted September 23, 9:07 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, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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)
IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN LOS ANGELES:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)
CLOSING FRIDAY IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN:
• The Circle (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
Posted September 23, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened and couldn't possibly have happened."
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Posted September 23, 12:00 AM
September 22, 2010
TT: (Euro)trashing an American classic
Starting today, I'll be filing two weekly drama columns for The Wall Street Journal. In addition to my regular Friday column, I'm going to be writing a second review for the paper's new Greater New York section that will appear on the day after the opening of a Broadway or off-Broadway play. While this review will not be published in the paper's national edition, it will be accessible to anyone who reads the Journal online.
I inaugurate the new regime in this morning's Journal with a review of the New York Theatre Workshop's revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Marvel. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Lillian Hellman lived a radical life, both politically and sexually, but when it came to her art, she was as traditional as a nun. She wrote "well-made" melodramas in which every corner of the plot is neatly tucked in, and her down-to-earth craftsmanship is one reason "The Little Foxes" was and is so popular. Not only did it run for a year on Broadway, but it has been revived regularly ever since that first production closed in 1940. I've seen "The Little Foxes" performed many times, and all of those stagings have been both naturalistic and true to the play's setting, Alabama in 1900. Now, though, the avant-garde has finally come knocking on Hellman's door: Ivo van Hove, a Flemish director who specializes in iconoclastic remixes of classics, has given us a high-concept "Little Foxes."
Mr. van Hove's approach to the play is easily explained: It's a modern-dress staging performed without southern accents on a minimalist set, accompanied by minimalist music. If you see a lot of Shakespeare or go to the opera more than once a year, you'll have seen plenty such productions, and you'll more than likely be familiar with the rest of the tricks in Mr. van Hove's bag. Jan Versweyveld's set, which is presumably intended to suggest a seven-figure Manhattan duplex, contains no furniture except for a Hammond organ in the corner and a video screen on the wall that is used to project offstage scenes. Kevin Guyer's costumes mostly run to shades of black. All the performers have clearly been instructed to act in as up-to-date a manner as possible...
You are, perhaps, getting the point? The plot of "The Little Foxes," in which the hateful members of a family of exploitative nouveau-riche tradesmen claw one another's eyes out over a business deal, is--brace yourself--as contemporary as today's headlines! Thank you, Mr. van Hove, for trotting out all the clichés in the postmodern book in order to tell us something about "The Little Foxes" that anyone with a quarter of a brain in his head could figure out on his own...
The really sad part is that Mr. van Hove has put together a stageful of class-A actors to enact his simple-minded take on "The Little Foxes." Elizabeth Marvel and Cristin Milioti, who play Regina, the villainess-in-chief, and her soon-to-be-disillusioned daughter Alexandra, turn in performances of attention-seizing intensity that are as revelatory as the production itself is trite....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 22, 12:00 AM
TT: Snapshot
Ingrid Bergman plays the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directed by Alex Segal and starring Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, and Trevor Howard. The production was taped by the BBC in 1962 and broadcast in the United States on CBS in 1963. This performing version was adapted by Phil Reisman from Eva Le Gallienne's translation:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted September 22, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-too-Human
Posted September 22, 12:00 AM
September 21, 2010
TT: Mistakes were made
I just seem to get busier and busier. I spent the weekend in Florida speaking at Rollins College, my new home-away-from-home, and tomorrow Mrs. T and I head for Boston to see the Huntington Theatre Company's revival of Bus Stop. After that I'll be flying out to Missouri to visit my family, followed by a quick trip to Chicago to take in a couple of shows.
Once you have a sufficient number of balls in the air, I suspect that there's no way to avoid dropping them from time to time, which explains (I hope!) how I let a certain number of tiny errors creep into the text of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Fortunately, I was able to fix all of them in the newly published paperback edition. A reader asked me last week if I could send her an errata list, so I've decided to post it here for the benefit of scholars, jazz buffs, and anyone who likes to see a critic admit to being wrong. Enjoy yourselves!
* * *
PAGE 13, LINE 32: insert "grand-opera" before "tenor," making the phrase read "...a lordly grand-opera tenor."
PAGE 37, PHOTO CAPTION: change "The inscription is in..." to "The inscription at the top is in..."
PAGE 48, LINE 1: change "never" to "rarely."
PAGE 124, LINE 13: change "...mob-run nightclub located in the same..." to "...mob-run nightclub which in 1937 would move to the same..."
PAGE 152, LINE 35: change "...inauspicious film debut..." to "...inauspicious debut..."
PAGE 158, LINES 2-3: change "...that the drummer's boss, who led the band..." to "...that Abe Lyman, who had led the band..."
PAGE 158, LINE 21: change "He continued to play there..." to "He played there..."
PAGE 158, LINE 22: change "...when he went on trial before Judge..." to "when he pleaded guilty and was sentenced by Judge..."
PAGE 158, LINE 28: cut "jail."
PAGE 158, LINE 29: change "remainder" to "rest."
PAGE 168, PHOTO CAPTION: cut "1931."
PAGE 172, LINE 28: change "...Buddy Bolden died in New Orleans and three months after..." to "...Buddy Bolden died and three months after..." (i.e., cut "in New Orleans").
PAGE 323, LINE 33: change "...Sidney Bechet, who received the same honor, wrote..." to "...Sidney Bechet, who would have liked nothing better than to receive the same honor, wrote..." (i.e., change "received" to "would have liked nothing better than to receive").
PAGE 174, LINE 15: cut the comma inside the close-quote mark after "National Emblem March."
PAGE 203, LINE 20: cut the comma after "America Dances!"
PAGE 214, LINE 30: cut "fifty cents, then," making the phrase read "...sold for thirty-five."
PAGE 216, LINE 5: change "sedate-sounding" to "placid-sounding."
PAGE 313, LINE 18: change "Charles Walter" to "Charles Walters."
PAGE 340, LINE 10: change "...is too earnest..." to "...is sometimes too earnest..."
PAGE 340, LINE 29: set "Sullivan" in roman, not italics.
PAGE 372, LINE 31: change "Phoebe Jacobs" to "the trumpeter."
PAGE 382, LINE 9: cut "and." LINE 11: after "grew," change the period to a semicolon, then insert the following: "...and Walter Darby Bannard, who first suggested the title."
PAGE 406, ADD TO SOURCE LIST OF BOOKS IN CHAPTER 4: "Jonson, Bix."
PAGE 407, SUB ENTIRE LAST NOTE AS FOLLOWS: "He was a cute little boy": Sudhalter, 39. See also Satchmo, 209, SP, 26, and Dodds, 24). Beiderbecke told members of his family that he heard Fate Marable's band in Louisiana, Mo., in the summer of 1921, but he did not mention LA, and the two men may well have met earlier (Jonson, 693).
PAGE 413, LINE 37: change "Club Apex" to "Apex Nite Club" ("Nite," not "Night," is correct).
PAGE 414, LINE 20, SUB ENTIRE NOTE AS FOLLOWS: "Abe Lyman, Vic's leader": Berton, 389. Lyman actually led the Cocoanut Grove band from 1921 to 1925. In 1930 its leader was Gus Arnheim, who had been Lyman's pianist. Berton was sentenced to ninety nights in the county jail, from which he was released each morning so that he could fulfill his professional commitments. Court records show that Berton and LA were not tried together and that LA's case was not handled similarly.
PAGE 436, LINE 32: change "Atlanta University" to "Alabama University."
PAGE 474, LEG 2: change index entry for "Charles Walter" to "Charles Walters."
PAGE 445, ADD THIS ENTRY TO BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jonson, Rich J., with Jim Arpy and Gerri Bowers. Bix: The Davenport Album. Barnegat, NJ: Razor Edge Press, 2009.
Posted September 21, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Everyone complains of his lack of memory but no one of his lack of judgment."
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
Posted September 21, 12:00 AM
September 20, 2010
TT: Inside and out
Nicholas Lemann, a native of New Orleans, writing apropos of David Simon's Treme in the New York Review of Books:
New Orleans is at once a welcoming and an inaccessible city. As a tourist town it has no choice but to be friendly to visitors. Its charms, which are abundantly on display in Treme--not just the music but the food, the domestic architecture, and the street culture--are matters of public expression. On the other hand New Orleans is an old, provincial city, whose distinctiveness comes substantially from its being cut off from many of the main currents of American culture. It's an easy city to come from and a hard city to move to; full membership can take a generation or two to achieve. So while New Orleans necessarily and relentlessly entertains its visitors, the better one gets to know it the more often one is reminded that one doesn't, really. A certain kind of New Orleanian gets very invested in becoming a walking encyclopedia on everything--the real stuff, not the tourist stuff--about the city, and a certain kind of newcomer gets very invested in establishing New Orleans bona fides by learning everything that the semiprofessional New Orleans insiders know.
Me, writing in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong about a city that I'd never seen when I penned the following paragraph five years ago:
To the northerner New Orleans is another country, seductive and disorienting, a steamy, shabby paradise of spicy cooking, wrought-iron balconies, and streets called Desire and Elysian Fields, a place where the signs advertise such mysterious commodities as po-boys and muffuletta and no one is buried under ground. We'll take the boat to the land of dreams, the pilgrim hears in his mind's ear as he prowls the French Quarter, pushing through the hordes of tipsy visitors and wondering whether the land of his dreams still exists--if it ever did. Rarely does he linger long enough to pierce the veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade. At the end of his stay he knows no more than when he came, and goes back home to puzzle out all that he has seen and smelled and tasted. A.J. Liebling, a well-traveled visitor from up north, saw New Orleans as a Mediterranean port transplanted to the Gulf of Mexico, a town of civilized pleasures whose settlers "carried with them a culture that had ripened properly, on the tree." He knew what he was seeing, but Walker Percy, who lived and died there, cast a cooler eye on the same sights: "The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace....Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle." Unlike Liebling, he caught the smell of decay.
Never underestimate the power of research, Mr. Lemann.
Posted September 20, 12:00 AM
TT: Just because
Noël Coward sings "Nina (From Argentina)" on Together With Music, telecast on CBS in 1955:
Posted September 20, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"You can't order remembrance out of a man's mind."
William Thackeray, The Virginians
Posted September 20, 12:00 AM
September 19, 2010
DISASTER IN DETROIT
"We like to think that great symphony orchestras and museums are permanent monuments to the enduring power and significance of art, but in the twenty-first century, we are going to learn the hard way that this is simply not true..."Posted September 19, 10:51 PM
Almanac
Today's entry: William Thackeray on memory. http://tinyurl.com/238mox3Posted September 19, 10:02 PM
September 17, 2010
TT: Two heads are lesser than one
Two strikes and I'm out: I don't have much of anything good to say about the New York premiere of Edward Albee's Me, Myself & I or the world premiere of Lucy Thurber's Bottom of the World in this morning's Wall Street Journal drama column. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
It's widely thought that Edward Albee is America's greatest living playwright, and I think I'd go so far as to say that he's the author of the greatest play by a living American playwright. But "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is the only one of Mr. Albee's 30 plays to have made an enduring impression on the general public--indeed, it's possible that "Virginia Woolf" could be the last American play of any kind to have made such an impression--and so much of his subsequent work has been so slight that I find it hard to see him as the major artist that his admirers take him to be. Nor will the New York premiere of "Me, Myself & I" add any luster to his reputation, for it is a tediously jokey piece of Surrealism Lite that wears out its welcome almost as soon as the curtain goes up.
Like many of Mr. Albee's previous plays, "Me, Myself & I" is rigidly premise-driven: Two of the characters are identical twins, and both of them are named Otto. Otto the Loud (Zachary Booth), whose name is spelled "OTTO," is a nasty troublemaker who loathes his horrible mother (Elizabeth Ashley). Otto the Soft (Preston Sadleir), whose name is spelled "otto," is a quiet, likable fellow who is understandably taken aback when OTTO announces without warning that otto "doesn't exist anymore." This could, I suppose, serve as the basis for a moderately provocative play, but Mr. Albee has chosen instead to dish up an evening's worth of feeble who's-on-first comebacks and jokes that weren't funny when they were new...
Lucy Thurber's name is frequently to be found on promising-young-playwrights lists, but "Bottom of the World," her latest effort, didn't leave me longing to see more of her work. It's a scattershot portrait of Abigail (Crystal A. Dickinson), whose sister (Jessica Love), a promising young novelist, has died unexpectedly. Devastated by her loss, Abigail obsessively reenacts scenes from her sister's last novel in her mind while simultaneously trying to resume her love life. Not only is the audience treated along the way to jejune reflections on death and dying ("Some things get broken and never get fixed"), but Abigail's sister, judging by the evidence presented in "Bottom of the World," doesn't seem to have been a very good writer....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 17, 12:00 AM
TT: Disaster in Detroit
The management of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is grappling with a nine-million-dollar budget shortfall by proposing to cut musicians' salaries by nearly thirty percent. The musicians have responded by voting to authorize a strike. It's widely speculated that this could kill the orchestra altogether--but Detroit is a city in the most desperate economic straits imaginable, and it seems highly unlikely that anyone in town would be able or willing to bail the DSO out.
All of which has led me to write a "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal in which I ask the necessary but not-so-obvious question: is it even possible, much less desirable, for a city whose population has shrunk by fifty percent in the past half-century to try to support a world-class orchestra? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 17, 12:00 AM
TT: Come see me!
If you should happen to be in or near Winter Park, Florida, on Sunday afternoon, I'm going to be talking about my latest project, a biography of Duke Ellington. My appearance is part of "The New Animated Magazine," an elaborate and enticing program being put on by Rollins College's Winter Park Institute, the campus-based think tank under whose auspices I'll be speaking, teaching, and writing as a resident scholar during the first part of 2011.
The fun starts at 3:30 at Rollins' Tiedke Concert Hall. Go here and here to read all about it.
Posted September 17, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses."
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men
Posted September 17, 12:00 AM
September 16, 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, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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)
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)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
IN LOS ANGELES:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN:
• The Circle (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 25, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN:
• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
Posted September 16, 12:00 AM
TT: Backward glance
I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night for the first time since its original release, and was pleased to see that it holds up exceptionally well.
I looked up what I wrote about it in 2004:
Napoleon Dynamite is an unusually smart movie masquerading as a teen-angst farce. The best high-school flicks have a way of being quite unexpectedly touching, and sometimes even subtly observant (Heathers was one of the smartest movies of the past decade), and if I had to choose between, say, Saving Private Ryan and Dazed and Confused, or Bulworth and Clueless, I'd opt for the feather-light soufflé over the heavily earnest main course every time. Napoleon Dynamite, an independent comedy made by a bunch of Idaho-based crazies, is as good as or better than those fondly remembered films, and it also has a touch of strangeness, even surrealism, that makes it pleasingly tricky to categorize.The underlying plot mechanism is lifted from Revenge of the Nerds, but the title character (exquisitely well played by Jon Heder) is so extreme in his geekery that he never engages your sympathy--nor does he try. That's what's makes Napoleon Dynamite interesting: though it's pulverizingly funny, it's not a feel-good movie. Instead, it combines the sharp-eyed small-town spoofery of Waiting for Guffman with the tough-minded social satire of Election and Daria. Yet none of these cinematic reference points, relevant though they are, can fully convey its special quality.
I'd stand by those words today.
Posted September 16, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"To assert dignity is to lose it."
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men
Posted September 16, 12:00 AM
September 15, 2010
DVD
Me & Orson Welles (Warner). Richard Linklater's 2009 film, now out on home video, is a witty, ingenious, perfectly cast, brilliantly designed, and astonishingly well informed backstage rom-com about the Mercury Theatre's 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar. It didn't get nearly as much attention as it deserved when it was released, and I saw it purely by chance on an airplane a couple of months ago. Catch up with it now and prepare to be both charmed and enthralled. I don't know when I've seen a better movie about what it feels like to put on a play (TT).Posted September 15, 7:25 PM
TT: Snapshot
Joe Orton, interviewed on ITV's The Eamonn Andrews Show five months before his death in 1967:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted September 15, 12:00 AM
TT: Right to left
I received the first copy of the paperback edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong in yesterday's mail. It'll be published by Mariner Books on October 7, and you can already order a copy from Amazon by going here.
The Pops paperback is a good-looking piece of work, bestrewn inside and out with vanity-piquing quotes from some of the book's admiring reviewers. Even if you already own the hardcover edition, you might want to consider buying a copy of the paperback for two reasons. Not only did I correct a dozen or so niggling little errors in the text, but Mariner has also fixed the cover photograph of Armstrong, which was inadvertently reversed on the original dust jacket.
The funny thing about this blunder is that nobody who knew Armstrong--including four close friends of his who read the manuscript of Pops--noticed it. It wasn't until I received a pair of e-mails from James Breig and Kenny Harris, two readers of this blog who have very sharp eyes, that I realized that the cover photo had been flipped. Now that I'm able to view the two editions side by side, I'll confess that I can still barely tell the two Satchmos apart. Except for a tiny depression on his forehead, he was a symmetrical-looking guy.
Be that as it may, I'm delighted to nudge Pops a bit closer to perfection. I sat down last night and read through it for the first time in months, and I was pleased and proud. I think I did right by Louis Armstrong. I hope you agree.
Posted September 15, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts."
Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw
Posted September 15, 12:00 AM
September 14, 2010
TT: Almanac
"What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?"
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men
Posted September 14, 12:00 AM
September 13, 2010
TT: Loving tongue
I just received in the mail two copies of Pops: A Vida de Louis Armstrong, the Brazilian edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which was published last month by Larousse. The design of the book is essentially identical to that of the American edition, except that it's in Portuguese. The translators are Andrea Gottlieb and Castro Neves, and I wish I could tell you that they did a fabulous job. Alas, I must confess to being humiliatingly ignorant of a language to which I have nonetheless spent countless hours listening. Would that my longstanding passion for the music of Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Sérgio Mendes, Luciana Souza, and Trio da Paz had miraculously caused me to learn Portuguese by osmosis, but the only word I know in that lovely, liquid tongue is, appropriately enough, saudade.
Even though I'll have to leave it to my Brazilian friends to tell me whether Ms. Gottlieb and Mr. Neves got it right, I still managed to spend an exceedingly pleasant hour leafing through the Brazilian edition of Pops and marveling at how much cooler I seem to sound in Portuguese. My favorite passage from Pops, for instance, is the last paragraph:
Faced with the terrible realities of the time and place into which he had been born, he did not repine, but returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work. Therein lay the ultimate meaning of his epic journey from squalor to immortality: his sunlit, hopeful art, brought into being by the labor of a lifetime, spoke to all men in all conditions, and helped make them whole.
Here it is in Portuguese:
Confrontado pelas terríveis realidades do lugar e da época em que nasceu, ela não se afligiu, mas retribuiu ódio com amor e procurou a salvação no trabalho. É aí que está o resultado supremo da épica jornada que percorreu da esqualidez à imortalidade: sua arte, iluminada pelo sol, cheia de esperança, criada pelo trabalho de uma vida e capaz de tocar todos os homens de qualquer condição, e torná-los completos.
Doesn't that just make you want to roll over and purr?
As I flipped through the book, I ran across a number of additional footnotes that were credited to the translators. Notwithstanding my inability to speak Portuguese, I could see that their purpose was to explain to Brazilian readers the meanings of various untranslatable English-language expressions, including Uncle Tom, minstrel show, black-and-tan club, poboy, hepcat, and--this one is my favorite--The Jetsons:
Familio do desenho animado de mesmo nome da Hanna-Barbera, criado nos anos 1960 e ambientado no ano de 2062, no qual o futuro é descrito como um mundo de robôs, hologramas, carros voadores etc.
I suspect that these footnotes are in large part responsible for the other main difference between the two versions of Pops, which is that the Brazilian edition is thirty-six pages longer than the American edition.
I was fascinated, by the way, to read the following translation and explication of these lines from a song by Fats Waller and Andy Razaf: My only sin is in my skin/What did I do to be so black and blue? Take it away, colleagues:
Meu único pecado está na minha pele/O que fiz para ser tão negro e trist? [blue, em inglês, significa tanto a cor azul quanto tristeza].
Quanto tristeza, indeed!
* * *
Luciana Souza sings "Docemente" with the Fred Hersch Trio:
If an audiobook version of Pops should ever be published in Brazil, I'd like her to read it.
Posted September 13, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Well, here I went to Long Island Rail Road. It's the first time I've done that, so I got to Penn Station really early, so I could ask directions. Some of the policemen recognized me, and I bought my senior ticket to Montauk for $11, off peak. I sat in the waiting room with a lot of people, and occasionally somebody recognized me. It's lovely, and it's very important to be respectful of it and accept it. Occasionally I have to be aware that there is also, in some people, a degree of resentment, as though I would think that I'm any different than anyone else. I'm not. I thrive on modesty and humility. I never said that I had perspective and judgment."
Elliott Gould, interview, New York Times, Sept. 3, 2010
Posted September 13, 12:00 AM
September 12, 2010
TT: Just because (in memoriam)
Pablo Casals plays the G Major Cello Suite at the Prades Festival in 1954:
Posted September 12, 12:00 AM
September 11, 2010
TT: Almanac (in memoriam)
"I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it."
William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman
Posted September 11, 12:00 AM
September 10, 2010
CAAF: War and Peace and fathers
I'm reading War and Peace right now, and it's exhilarating. I've always meant to and I had an idea that I'd read it this fall in preparation for Freedom so that I'd get the War and Peace allusions that Kakutani says are there (although she calls them "laughably conceited"). Which means, if you're currently reading Freedom, I look forward to discussing it with you in spring 2012.
I finished Part 1 this morning (a little over 100 pages in) and was pretty sodden with a pile of used Kleenex beside me. That section ends with Prince Andrei's departure for the war, with his father screaming him out the door of his study in an excess of nerves and then blowing his nose over and over once the door is shut. So far I'm finding the novel's male characters especially affecting, and this scene, with the father's agitation, did me in. (One of my nephews served several years in Iraq, and when he came home, there was a big breakfast here in Asheville at which my dad, in his relief and pride but already in poor health, kept sending pancakes from his plate down the table to my nephew, who had a full plate of his own. Person to person, fork to fork, the pancakes would go. Prince Andrei and his father are, of course, on the other side of this emotional equation, with the young man just heading off, neither knowing what is to come.)
The other leave-taking between a father and son happens when Pierre, an illegitimate son, is called to the deathbed of his father, the count, and in his awkwardness doesn't know what to do. He stands by as people minister to his father, and there's this tremendous moment where his father, being lifted by attendants, passes his son held high in the air, which shocked me both because the entire scene is so moving and because it's echoed (consciously, I think) in Nabokov's famous image of his father levitating in the sky in Speak, Memory.
From War and Peace (I'm reading the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation):
The carriers, who also included Anna Mikhailovna, came even with the young man, and for a moment, over people's backs and necks, he saw the high, fleshy, bared chest and massive shoulders of the sick man, raised up by the people who held him under the arms, and his curly, gray leonine head.
And Nabokov's memorial description of his father being tossed in the air by the estate's peasants ("a token of gratitude"), which closes chapter one:
From my place at the table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and the funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
Posted September 10, 12:32 PM
TT: Just because
In an excerpt from Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore plays a parody of middle-period Beethoven, using F.J. Ricketts' Colonel Bogey March as his theme:
Posted September 10, 12:00 AM
TT: Absent with leave
I'm taking the week off from my Wall Street Journal drama column. I'll be back next Friday.
Posted September 10, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it."
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Posted September 10, 12:00 AM
September 9, 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, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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)
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)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:
• The Circle (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 25, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN:
• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
Posted September 09, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission."
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
Posted September 09, 12:00 AM
September 8, 2010
TT: Snapshot
An extremely rare black-and-white single-camera performance film of Mabel Mercer singing Burton Lane's "Wait Till We're Sixty-Five" and Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," shot from the balcony of New York's Town Hall during a 1974 concert:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted September 08, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"To slave, to devote oneself, to have the highest imaginable sense of duty--these were excellent things, things of great merit. Merit--solid worth: it was unavailing against the sudden flash and bang, the inexplicable manifestation of talent. People did not easily forgive it that to you, not to them, had the gift been given."
William Haggard, Slow Burner
Posted September 08, 12:00 AM
September 7, 2010
TT: The bigger, the better
Mrs. T asked me last night if Harcourt had published a large-print edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I explained that such editions were published by specialty houses and that I wasn't aware that Pops had gotten the large-print treatment.
This morning I recalled our conversation, booted up my MacBook, and learned, much to my surprise, that a large-print paperback edition of Pops was published by Thorndike Press in May. You can order it for yourself or a partially sighted friend by going here.
Posted September 07, 10:17 AM
TT: Second stanza
Mrs. T and I encountered some difficulties when we took a vacation earlier this summer, most of which, I freely confess, were of my making. Having had only modest experience with full-fledged vacations, I crammed too many activities and too much travel into not enough time, making us completely exhausted by the time we returned home. We then launched into the usual frenzied coast-to-coast round of visits to summer theater festivals, which ran us both down still further. At some point along the way, it occurred to me that what we needed was a second vacation--one during which we would do nothing whatsoever. To this end, I hacked eight precious days out of my schedule, and last Monday we packed our bags, hopped in the car, and headed west.
Never let it be said that nobody learns from experience. This time around I arranged things so that I had no shows to see, no deadlines to hit, and no "improving books" (thank you, Jeeves) to read in my spare time. The only books that I brought with me on the trip were a half-dozen mysteries by Rex Stout and Georges Simenon. I packed my laptop and checked my e-mail more or less regularly, but I kept my communication with the outside world down to a fairly bare minimum, and I didn't write a single word for publication, or for this blog, while Mrs. T and I were on the move.
Longtime readers won't be surprised to hear that we divided our time between Bridgeton House in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, and Ecce Bed and Breakfast in Barryville, New York, two lovely, immaculately run inns situated near different stretches of the Delaware River. I've raved about both places before--Mrs. T and I actually honeymooned at Ecce--and I knew that our hosts would treat us like crowned royalty. We slept well, ate well, and spent long spans of time listening to the Delaware River flow. Otherwise we emulated the sound advice that Jack Nicholson failed to take in Chinatown: we did as little as possible.
The effects of all this masterly inactivity can be summed up in ten happy words: I can't remember the last time I felt so rested. I knew I was tired, but I didn't fully understand how tightly wrapped I was until the knots came undone and I started to relax. By the time we returned to Connecticut late yesterday afternoon, I'd shed my cares and felt like myself again--or, rather, like the self I ought to be. It helped that I took further care to arrange things so that I won't be going back to work again until Saturday, when I'll return to New York to see a preview of Edward Albee's new play. Until then I mean to ease back into the world an inch or two at a time.
And then? The trick will be to figure out to unwind in the interstices of my working life. I don't expect to be very good at it. I have half a lifetime of bad habits to unlearn, and some "lessons" have to be learned over and over again. But at least I've found out how it feels to be completely unwound, thanks to Mrs. T and our kindly hosts at Bridgeton House and Ecce. May their efforts not be in vain!
Posted September 07, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals."
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Posted September 07, 12:00 AM
September 6, 2010
TT: Fifteen albums in fifteen minutes
A number of friends have invited me to play the following game that's been making the rounds in cyberspace:
The rules: Don't take too long to think about it--choose fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. (These aren't favorite albums, necessarily, just the fifteen that will always stick with you.)
I drew my list up with as little forethought as possible. When I was finished, I realized that in all but a couple of instances, these were the albums that introduced me to the music of the artists who made them.
I subsequently got to know some of those artists personally. It was on Maria Bachmann's Fratres, for example, that I first heard the music of Paul Moravec, with whom I was to collaborate on The Letter sixteen years later.
Here goes:
• Louis Armstrong, Satchmo at Symphony Hall
• Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff, Fratres
• The Band, The Band
• Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
• Duke Ellington, Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band
• Bill Evans, Conversations With Myself
• Vladimir Horowitz, The Historic Return
• Nancy LaMott, Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer
• Mabel Mercer, The Art of Mabel Mercer
• Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life
• Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music
• Luciana Souza, Brazilian Duos
• Steely Dan, Aja
• Joseph Szigeti and Béla Bartók, A Sonata Recital by Joseph Szigeti and Béla Bartók
• The Who, Live at Leeds
How about you, Our Girl and CAAF? Care to play? I showed you mine--now you show me yours!
Posted September 06, 12:00 AM
TT: Just because
Dave McKenna plays "A Beautiful Friendship" at the Northsea Jazz Festival in 1980:
Posted September 06, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."
W.H. Auden, "The Guilty Vicarage"
Posted September 06, 12:00 AM
September 5, 2010
PLEASE OMIT MUSIC (OR ELSE)
"What is it about music that gets true believers so hot and bothered? The British novelist Anthony Powell put his finger on it when he spoke in A Buyer's Market of the 'sensual essence' of the fine arts. This is especially true of music, which is both incorporeal--you can't see or touch it--and fundamentally sensual in its appeal..."Posted September 05, 11:29 PM
September 3, 2010
CAAF: The Galaxie 12
A few months ago I told my friend R. that I'd thrown out the novel I'd been working on for the past few years after realizing that it was hopelessly botched and started something new. A few days later he left this typewriter, a manual Smith-Corona, on my porch as a loan. Truth to tell, while I appreciated the gesture, the typewriter remained in its case until the other week when I got it out for some note-taking. I liked it, invested in a fresh ribbon, and now it's my new "orgasm pen."
The two main things I like about the typewriter: You have to move forward -- no endless revision with the delete key -- and it's not connected to the Internet. Also, the dog thumps her tail every time the carriage returns even when she's mid-nap.
Related: Maud recently uncovered this trove of BBC author interviews . There are lots of amazing ones, but my favorite so far is Daphne Du Maurier's as it opens on her at her typewriter, which would be the standard "the author at work" establishing shot except for DuMaurier's super-strong finger-punching technique on the keys.
Posted September 03, 3:00 PM
TT: Not so good for the geese
In the second of two reports from Wisconsin's American Players Theatre, I review a major revival of Somerset Maugham's rarely seen The Circle in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Long before he became one of the world's most popular novelists, Somerset Maugham was one of England's most successful playwrights. Four of his new plays actually ran simultaneously in London's West End in 1908, an achievement that makes Neil Simon look like a piker. But Maugham's brand of high social comedy had fallen from grace long before his death in 1965. It's been 21 years since any of his plays was successfully mounted on Broadway, and that one, "The Circle," presumably owed its success to the presence in the cast of Rex Harrison. While Maugham revivals are not unknown in this country, one almost always has to get out of New York to see them. So I hastened to Wisconsin's American Players Theatre, one of America's top classical companies, to find out how well "The Circle," which was first performed in London in 1921, has held up, and the answer--to my surprise--is that it is not merely viable but brilliant.
Most of Maugham's other plays, to be sure, are period pieces that merit the dusty obscurity into which they long ago fell, but "The Circle" is different. Instead of the not-quite-Wilde-enough epigrams of "The Constant Wife," we get a drawing room full of well-dressed but plain-spoken characters who might have stepped out of one of Maugham's own short stories, plus a plot so soundly made that you'll be engrossed as soon as the wheels start turning.
Lady Kitty (Tracy Michelle Arnold), the fallen woman at the center of "The Circle," walked out on Clive (Brian Mani), her husband, 30 years ago and ran off to Italy with Lord Porteous (James Ridge), Clive's best friend. Now Kitty and her aging consort have returned to England for the first time to pay a call on Arnold (Paul Hurley), her son, who was five years old when she bolted and is now a promising but priggish young politician who recoils at the thought of further scandal. Little does Arnold know that Elizabeth (Susan Shunk), his wife, has fallen for another man and is thinking of doing as Lady Kitty did...
James Bohnen, the departing artistic director of Chicago's Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, a troupe whose work I greatly admire, has caught the tone of "The Circle" with perfect exactitude, and his cast, which consists for the most part of old APT hands, is with him all the way. Ms. Shunk, who is so fine as Birdie in this season' revival of Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest," is, if anything, even more appealing as Elizabeth. At first her naïvete seems a bit much--you want to kick some sense into her--but before long you'll find yourself hoping against hope that she'll refuse to settle for the respectable life of a politician's wife....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 03, 12:00 AM
TT: Please omit music (or else)
You may possibly have read about the latest pronunciamento from Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who informed his unhappy people the other day that the promoting and teaching of music is "not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic." Would that this was a sick joke, but it's not, nor is it the first time that an Islamic leader has declared war on music in recent years.
Such craziness should always, of course, be drawn to the attention of innocents who ought to know better but usually don't, so I've made it the subject of my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Not wanting to settle for merely shooting fish in a barrel, though, I also discuss the equivocal relationship between Western Christianity and music. Read all about it in tomorrow's Journal, but for now suffice it to say that the West has a fair amount of splainin' of its own to do....
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Posted September 03, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"He was fond of the theatre, but aware that there were people who would consider his tastes old-fashioned, even barbarous. He liked a play to have a beginning and a middle and an end; he liked to spot the crises, to recognize a craftsman at his business of constructing craftily; he liked a firm ending, to leave the theatre with that tiny scar on consciousness which meant he had been moved. He knew that there were people who talked crossly about commercial theatre and the well-made play; he knew their opinions but he did not care for them."
William Haggard, Closed Circuit
Posted September 03, 12:00 AM
September 2, 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, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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)
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)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:
• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:
• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN LENOX, MASS.:
• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
• The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, reviewed here)
Posted September 02, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"In his personal and private shorthand Peter Davis had tagged Patricia Leggatt, and the tag was upper arty. It had amused him to imagine her background, for the Minister's modest flat where he had met her clearly wasn't her natural stamping ground. That would be somewhere in the Cadogans, he had decided, somewhere rich and talkative. The people lived by taking each other's photographs. Not really, of course: they all had private incomes which it was very bad form to mention; they all assumed that you had too. And they talked--how they talked! They talked novels and pictures and plays, and operas you'd never heard of. Not that they knew much about them, for solid knowledge meant work--hard reading and even thought. But they knew what was new.
"What was new was worth chattering about."
William Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep
Posted September 02, 12:00 AM
September 1, 2010
TT: Snapshot
The Gary Burton Quartet plays Steve Swallow's "General Mojo's Well Laid Plan" in 1967. The guitarist is Larry Coryell:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted September 01, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Listening to other opinions was invariably more profitable than antagonizing their owners by pointing out tiresome objections."
William Haggard, The Hard Sell
Posted September 01, 12:00 AM