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October 29, 2010
ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Ghostlight). Now on CD, the score of the first Broadway musical ever to make fully effective and idiomatic use of rock. Michael Friedman's hard-edged, guitar-driven emo-style songs are tuneful, smart, and catchy (especially "Ten Little Indians"). Nor is there the slightest trace of slickness: this is real rock, not the synthetic kind. See the show by all means, but the best of it is right here (TT).Posted October 29, 1:44 AM
BOOK
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Updated and Expanded (Knopf, $40). There's still no room for Whit Stillman or Parker Posey in the newly revised fifth edition of the most idiosyncratically interesting of all books about movies, which says much about the author's increasingly quaint big-is-best perspective: David Thomson continues to believe that Hollywood has the power to make America a better place, and fears that it is no longer fulfilling its culture-shaping potential. Fortunately, you can easily ignore that aspect of the book and concentrate instead on its crisp, wholly personal, and unfailingly illuminating appraisals of everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Orson Welles. Thomson may be old-fashioned, but that doesn't make him predictable, much less irrelevant (TT).Posted October 29, 1:35 AM
TT: Seven ways of looking at Angels in America
I have a lot to say about the off-Broadway revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America in this morning's Wall Street Journal, some of it good, some of it not so good, though the production itself is exemplary. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
"Angels" is not one but three plays loosely woven together into a two-installment structure....
Roy Cohn (Frank Wood) is by far the most compelling character in "Angels." Each time he leaves the stage, the dramatic tension slackens. Herbert von Karajan is supposed to have said that had he written Puccini's "Tosca," he would have called it "Scarpia" (who is the opera's villain). By the same token, my guess is that a fair number of viewers of "Angels in America" would rather be watching a play called "Cohn."
For that matter, any of the three plays that make up "Angels" might well have been more effective had it been presented on its own--but if Mr. Kushner had done that, then the original 1993 Broadway production wouldn't have been touted by the press as a Major Theatrical Event. To say this, though, is not to cast doubt on the purity of Mr. Kushner's artistic intentions. Indeed, what is most impressive about "Angels" is precisely that it tries to do so much, that its author was willing to take chances instead of sticking to off-the-rack how-to-do-it theatrical models. That's why "Angels," for all its flaws, has been so influential.
Here as elsewhere in his work, the problem is not that Mr. Kushner is overly ambitious, but that he lets his ambitions run roughshod over his sense of proportion. Taken together, the two installments of "Angels" add up to a seven-hour span, which is at least two hours too long....
As for the present production, I think it's more than enough to note that Michael Greif's staging is fierce and exact, that Mark Wendland's compact double-turntable set is a miraculously efficient piece of design, that Wendall K. Harrington's digital projections add immeasurably to the set's spatial richness and that the cast is uniformly splendid, with Zachary Quinto, Mr. Wood (who looks eerily like Robert Mapplethorpe's photo of Roy Cohn in middle age) and the ever-amazing Zoe Kazan taking top honors....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
To hear a 1968 radio interview with Roy Cohn, go here.
To see Robert Mapplethorpe's portrait of Roy Cohn, go here.
Al Pacino and James Cromwell play Roy Cohn and his doctor in an excerpt from Mike Nichols' 2003 TV version of Angels in America:
Posted October 29, 12:00 AM
TT: Great Caesar's ghost!
I've been wanting to write at length about Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles ever since I saw it on a flight to California earlier this year. Now that the film is available on DVD, I've written a "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal in which, among other things, I talk in detail about the meticulous way in which Linklater and his collaborators have reconstructed the Mercury Theatre's celebrated 1937 modern-dress production of Julius Caesar, no part of which, alas, was filmed at the time:
"Me and Orson Welles" is a coming-of-age screwball comedy in which Zac Efron, lately of "High School Musical," plays a stage-struck high-school senior who unexpectedly finds himself playing a bit part in "Julius Caesar." Don't snicker: Christian McKay's impersonation of Welles is so accurate as to be spooky, and despite the film's obligatory (albeit charming) rom-com trappings, I've never seen a backstage movie that was truer to the experience of putting on a show.What makes "Me and Orson Welles" uniquely interesting to scholars of American drama is that Mr. Linklater's design team found the Gaiety Theatre on the Isle of Man. This house closely resembles the old Comedy Theatre on 41st Street, which was torn down five years after "Julius Caesar" opened there. Using Samuel Leve's original designs, they reconstructed the set for "Julius Caesar." Then Mr. Linklater filmed some 15 minutes' worth of scenes from the play on the Gaiety's stage, lit according to Jean Rosenthal's plot, accompanied by Marc Blitzstein's original incidental music and staged in a style as close to that of the 1937 production as is now possible.
I saw "Me and Orson Welles" on an airplane a few months ago and was floored by the verisimilitude of the results. No sooner did I get off the plane than I looked up the reviews, and was shocked to discover that none of the critics seemed aware of what Mr. Linklater had done. The only article that gave any sense of the film's historical significance was by Simon Callow, Mr. Welles' biographer, who flatly declared that Mr. Linklater "got it all right." And so he did: You will never get any closer to the Welles "Julius Caesar" than by watching "Me and Orson Welles," whose DVD version also includes a special feature comprised of footage of the reconstructed scenes, not all of which made the final cut....
Read the whole thing here.
* * *
Welles and the original Mercury Theatre cast of Julius Caesar recorded excerpts from the play for Columbia in 1938. To listen to this recording in streaming audio, go here and click on "Mar 1938 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar."
The theatrical trailer for Me and Orson Welles:
Posted October 29, 12:00 AM
TT: Me and Candace
Longtime readers of this blog know that Our Girl and I are devoted fans of the comic novels of Elaine Dundy, who died in 2008, not long after I wrote a preface for New York Review Books' reissue of The Dud Avocado, her most celebrated and successful book.
On Monday, Candace Bushnell (yes, that Candace Bushnell) and I will be sharing a platform to talk about Dundy and her work. Our joint appearance, in the course of which I'll be reading from The Dud Avocado and Bushnell from The Old Man and Me, takes place at the Barnes & Noble on Lexington Avenue at Eighty-Sixth Street. The festivities begin at seven o'clock. I've never met Bushnell, so this should be interesting!
For more information, go here.
Posted October 29, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like—not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing."
Henry James, Flaubert
Posted October 29, 12:00 AM
October 28, 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:
• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Lombardi * (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, 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 CHICAGO:
• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Nov. 14, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN CLEVELAND:
• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)
• An Ideal Husband (comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Saturday, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, reviewed here)
Posted October 28, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."
Henry James, letter to Charles Eliot Norton, Feb. 4, 1872
Posted October 28, 12:00 AM
October 27, 2010
TT: Snapshot
A rare sound film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted October 27, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Critics must have been created on the seventh day. Because if God had created them on the first day, what on earth would they have done?"
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, journal entry, Mar. 8, 1863
Posted October 27, 12:00 AM
October 26, 2010
TT: A perfect night on Broadway
Due to heightened national interest in the Broadway premiere of Driving Miss Daisy, The Wall Street Journal asked me to write a special review that would run not in the Greater New York section but on the paper's national arts page. The show opened last night and the review is in this morning's Journal. My editors called it--the production is remarkable. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Everybody I know who saw the 1987 Off-Broadway production of Alfred Uhry's "Driving Miss Daisy" remembers it with awe and affection, and agrees that the cast--Morgan Freeman, Dana Ivey and Ray Gill--couldn't be bettered. If you're one of those lucky folk, I suggest that you head straight for Broadway, where James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave and Boyd Gaines are proving that when it comes to great acting, nobody ever has the last word. Alas, I saw Mr. Freeman only in the 1989 film version of "Driving Miss Daisy," in which he was wonderful. Mr. Jones, however, has put a wholly personal spin on the part, and he's giving a performance that is going to be talked about for the rest of his life--and after....
Where Mr. Freeman endowed Hoke with his own characteristic slyness, Mr. Jones opts instead to play him as a plain, blunt countryman whose sense of humor (if you can call it that) amounts to saying exactly what he thinks. I suspect that this approach is rather more realistic than that of Mr. Freeman, who in the film occasionally struck me as the least little bit too urbane to be true, and its effect is doubled and redoubled by Mr. Jones' foghorn voice and mammoth physical presence. If you want to know what star quality means, this is it.
During the first part of the play, I wondered whether Ms. Redgrave, who plays Daisy in a fairly low key, was going to get upstaged in a big way by Mr. Jones. Before long, though, I figured out that what I was seeing was in fact a smart decision by a seasoned pro. The only way to "compete" against a performance as dynamic as the one being given by Mr. Jones is to come at it from a different angle, and by underplaying the idiosyncrasies of the combative, querulous Daisy, Ms. Redgrave slips out from under his long shadow and makes an equally deep and persuasive impression....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The theatrical trailer for the 1989 film of Driving Miss Daisy:
Posted October 26, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The art of pleasing consists in never speaking of oneself and always talking to others of themselves. Every one is aware of this, yet how often is it forgotten."
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, journal entry, Mar. 4, 1860
Posted October 26, 12:00 AM
October 25, 2010
TT: I shall return
For me, being sick on the road is unspeakably frustrating—especially when I'm in an unfamiliar city that I want to explore. As I mentioned on Friday, I spent the weekend in Tucson, Arizona, and though I longed to hop in my rental car and check the place out, I chose instead to play it smart and stuck close to my hotel room, devoting Saturday morning to writing my Wall Street Journal review of Driving Miss Daisy and going out only to deliver two speeches (both of which seemed to go well) and see the play that I'd come to town to review. I did manage, however, to eat a meal at El Charro, one of the restaurants to which I'd been steered by aficionados of Mexican cuisine, and so I can say that the carne seca is every bit as good as its reputation. Otherwise, I mostly saw Tucson from my eleventh-floor window, a view that made me want very much to come back and stay a little longer.
Alas, I would have had to leave on Sunday even if I'd been at my picture-perfect best, for the off-Broadway revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America opens this week, and the only evenings on which I could catch preview performances of the two installments were tonight and Tuesday. So I flew back to New York with a good deal of reluctance, still sniffling and coughing but feeling a bit better, if by no means completely well.
I know myself, and one of the things I know is that I have a pronounced tendency to respond to signs of recovery from an illness by stepping hard on the gas pedal of my life instead of giving myself a chance to shake the bug off completely. My goal for the coming week is to keep on playing it smart instead of working myself into a relapse. Let's see how I do!
Posted October 25, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"I was brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have never learned the art of discontent."
John Buchan, Pilgrim's Way: An Essay in Recollection
Posted October 25, 12:00 AM
October 22, 2010
TT: Talking cure
Bronchitis or no bronchitis, I'm hitting the road this morning. My destination is Tucson, Arizona, where I'll be seeing the Arizona Theatre Company's production of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and delivering the keynote address for A Corigliano/Takemitsu Festival: Music and Film, a festival devoted to the music of John Corigliano and Toru Takemitsu that is being presented by the University of Arizona School of Music. The title of my talk, which takes place tonight at 7:30, is "Does American Culture Have a Future?" Brace yourself!
For more information about the festival and my speech, go here.
Posted October 22, 12:00 AM
TT: One for the guys
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of Lombardi, a play by Eric Simonson about the famous major-league football coach. Very much to my surprise, I liked it enormously. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
The question in the minds of just about everybody who's written about Eric Simonson's "Lombardi" to date is this: Who's going to go see a play about a football coach who died 40 years ago? If memory serves, the last sports-themed play to do really well on Broadway was Richard Greenberg's "Take Me Out," whose protagonist, a center fielder, is not only gay but biracial to boot. Somehow I doubt there's much of an overlap between the audience for "Take Me Out" and the target market for "Lombardi," whose title character, the Jesuit-schooled, fanatically competitive Vince Lombardi, was one of the straightest arrows ever to come out of the quiver (though he had a gay brother and was by all accounts tolerant of closeted football players). All this notwithstanding, the National Football League has put its marketing muscle behind "Lombardi" in return for a piece of the action, presumably operating on the assumption that there are plenty of men out there who don't usually go to Broadway shows (O.K., maybe they liked "Jersey Boys") but might be willing to make an exception for this one.
And why should you care? Because instead of cranking out a "Give 'Em Hell, Harry"-type exercise in feel-good historical hagiography, Mr. Simonson has given us an extremely well-crafted piece of intelligent middlebrow theater, a regular-guy equivalent of "Frost/Nixon." Such plays rarely make it to Broadway nowadays--the last one I saw there was "A Steady Rain," Keith Huff's two-man play about a pair of crooked Chicago cops--and this one, like "A Steady Rain" before it, is both tasty and filling. I know nothing about football and less about the Green Bay Packers, but "Lombardi" held my attention from start to finish, and when it was over, I went home feeling properly entertained....
Dan Lauria, whom TV viewers will remember from "The Wonder Years," knows a dream part when he sees one, and makes the most of this one. He plays Lombardi like a warmer but equally tough version of George C. Scott's Patton, and lurking beneath the buzzsaw bluster of his win-or-else tirades is a stealthy note of Pattonesque desperation, the fear that he'll blow his last chance to make it as a head coach....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted October 22, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable."
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, journal entry, Feb. 17, 1859
Posted October 22, 12:00 AM
October 21, 2010
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, 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 CHICAGO:
• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Nov. 14, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK 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 NEXT WEEK IN CLEVELAND:
• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• An Ideal Husband (comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
Posted October 21, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?"
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Posted October 21, 12:00 AM
October 20, 2010
TT: Snapshot
Dmitri Shostakovich plays an excerpt from the finale of his First Piano Concerto, filmed circa 1940:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted October 20, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness."
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Posted October 20, 12:00 AM
October 19, 2010
TT: Just because
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays the slow movement of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto in 1982, accompanied by Sergiu Celibidache and the London Symphony:
Posted October 19, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"You can still get all A's and flunk life."
Walker Percy, The Second Coming
Posted October 19, 12:00 AM
October 18, 2010
BOOK
Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (Simon & Schuster, $35). Who knew that the private life of the man who made The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth would turn out to be so scandalous? Yet DeMille's three mistresses are only a small part of this solidly written, impeccably researched biography, which traces with satisfying skill the nineteenth-century roots of the director's grandiose, often cartoonish style of epic filmmaking. It's one of the best Hollywood biographies to come along in recent years (TT).Posted October 18, 8:38 AM
PLAY
A Life in the Theatre (Gerald Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45, now closing Nov. 28). David Mamet's 1977 two-man play about a pair of actors, one young and one old, who are battling for dominance over one another, now on Broadway in a production graced by a superlative performance from Patrick Stewart. Though his acting is unmistakably English in tone--Americans expect a faster pace in Mamet--Stewart is fully alive to the complicated mixture of envy and rue that his character feels as he watches his younger, more talented colleague (T.R. Knight) take flight. The results are poignant and compellling (TT).Posted October 18, 8:38 AM
TT: Traveling light
Mr. Jazz Lives asks:
When we are able to buy all the recordings of Louis or Django at one expensive shelf-filling gulp, do we listen to them completely? Or are we perversely overawed by the completeness, the profusion?...I am reminded of my conversation with a musician who is now eighty, who talked about being able to buy one 78 record a week, so it had better be perfect. I am sure that had he, in 1944, been able to visualize the Complete Art Tatum Solo Performances in one package, he would have seen it as a wondrous mirage. How does it make us feel, I wonder. When our wants are gratified, will we be happier?
When I read this passage, I recalled the perverse sense of gratitude that I felt when I moved to a much smaller apartment a number of years ago and was forced to dispose of roughly two-thirds of my personal library--mostly books, to be sure, though I also pruned my CDs extensively and continue to do so on a regular basis.
Joseph Epstein, who had previously done the same thing, wrote an essay about the experience called "Books Won't Furnish a Room" that made a powerful impression on me at the time. This is the next-to-last paragraph:
I have almost as little desire to live in a library as I do on a golf course. I seek a compromise: living in a place where not every wall has a bookcase. I hope that by now the book collector's impulse is dead in me. With luck, I expect always to have the right books to keep my mind engaged, to put me gently to sleep at night, to be on hand to distract me during bouts of insomnia. I'm far from ready to go so far as Philip Larkin and say that "books are a load of crap." But in selling off my books I felt I was freeing myself in some way, entering another stage in life--though I'm not altogether clear what it might be. Behind my selling all these books was a longing to streamline my life a bit, make it feel less cluttered, encumbered, book bound. In doing so, I feel as if I had gathered my desert-island books about me without actually having to sail off for the island....
It was this piece, which was originally published in 2000, that gave me the courage to shed so many of my books and CDs. Never since have I regretted that hard decision, not even when I find myself briefly wishing that I had a specific book or album close to hand for purposes of research.
This is even true in the case of the jazz CDs that rank among my greatest treasures. I, too, once felt the mad desire to own every jazz record ever made, and to have them all shelved in chronological order at arm's length from my desk. Today I own just two racks, and whenever I acquire a new album, I get rid of an old one in order to make room for it. Not only has this imperative made me ruthlessly selective, but it has forced me to reconsider my priorities. Time was when I bought records in order to say that I had them. Now I keep them only because I love them.
No doubt the day is almost here when it will be possible for people like me to download the Complete Performances of Everybody to our computers...except that I'm no longer that kind of person. I love Art Tatum, but I don't want to own every record he ever made. I want to own the ones that matter to me, and let the others go. I want to be able to pull a CD or book from my shelves at random and know that it will please me, just as I hang on my walls only paintings and prints that move me deeply.
Why have I come to feel this way? Because I'm fifty-four. Life, I now know, is short, too short to waste, and the actuarial tables leave no possible doubt that most of mine has passed me by. As a professional critic, it's my job--my destiny, you might say--to spend a fair amount of time experiencing art that I don't like. Insofar as possible, though, I don't propose to waste any more of the days that remain to me consuming bad art than is absolutely necessary. Unless I'm being paid to do so, I won't even finish reading a book I don't like, or listening to a record that fails to engage me. I have better things to do, and not nearly enough time in which to do them.
Posted October 18, 12:00 AM
TT: The Ruhl thing
I review the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of The Language Archive, Julia Cho's new play, in the Greater New York section of today's Wall Street Journal. I found it a disappointment--for reasons that I didn't expect. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Much of "The Language Archive" has a shopworn ring, for it's yet another tale of emotionally inhibited middle-class folk who lead Lives of Quiet Desperation. George (Matt Letscher) is a brainy linguist who can't put his feelings for Mary (Heidi Schreck), his romance-starved wife, into words. This inspires Mary to pack her bags and catch the next train elsewhere. Meanwhile, we learn that Emma (Betty Gilpin), George's lab assistant, has an unrequited crush on her boss that she can't put into words. This inspires her to go out and study Esperanto, George's favorite language. In due course Emma meets Mary, who has found her bliss by becoming a baker of artisanal breads...
Like many American playwrights, Ms. Cho pays the rent by writing for TV, and I wonder whether her work on "Big Love" might be nudging her away from the tough-mindedness one expects from a properly promising young playwright. It seems at least as likely, though, that she has succumbed to the baleful influence of Sarah Ruhl, whose stomach-turning brand of preciousness is the latest theatrical fashion and whose sticky stylistic fingerprints are all over "The Language Archive." Indeed, it would appear that Ms. Cho (or Mark Brokaw, her director) has gone so far as to appropriate one particular piece of stage business from Ms. Ruhl's "The Clean House," a scene in which George teaches the audience how to conjugate the verb "love" in Esperanto while appropriate phrases are flashed on a screen suspended above the stage...
* * *
The print version of the Journal's Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of The Language Archive by going here.
Posted October 18, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"In art economy is always beauty."
Henry James, preface to The Altar of the Dead
Posted October 18, 12:00 AM
October 15, 2010
UNFORGETTABLE—IN MORE THAN ONE WAY
"Part of what made Nat Cole so remarkable, of course, is that he was as accomplished a singer as he was a pianist. While it isn't all that unusual for artists to wear two creative hats, you can almost always tell which one they favor. But a handful of artists have done significant work in more than one field, and their ability to do so without apparent strain is one of the enduring mysteries of art..."Posted October 15, 12:47 AM
TT: Emo-cracy comes to Broadway
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review two Broadway openings, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and La Bête. The first impressed me, the second bored me. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
"Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" is a not-exactly-history play in which the life of America's seventh president is given what might be called the Jon Stewart treatment (i.e., lots and lots of Irony Lite) and set to the style of rock known as "emo" (i.e., unabashed emotion accompanied by a just-kidding wink that draws the deadly sting of sincerity). And what are the results? Mixed--but also, if a middle-aged critic may dare to say so, hugely encouraging.
In "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," whose book is by Alex Timbers, Old Hickory (played with swaggering panache by Benjamin Walker) becomes a rock-star politician who speaks in the language of today, as do all his fellow characters. He's an Indian-hating populist from rural Tennessee who trades on his sex appeal to get the plain people to vote for him--think Bill Clinton with a guitar--then discovers, much to his surprise and dismay, that he hasn't any idea of how to actually run the damn country.
Comically speaking, "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" is a one-joke show that gets three-quarters of its laughs from the incongruity of hearing 19th-century characters use 21st-century slang: "The Era of Good Feelings? Huh! More like the Era of Bad Feelings! You guys are so dead!" Politically speaking, it's little more than an ultra-predictable mashup of Howard Zinn and "Dances With Wolves" (white people bad, red people good). We are, in short, in the land of cable-TV sketch comedy...
Michael Friedman's hard-edged, guitar-driven score is, however, another story. The music is tuneful, the lyrics are honest-to-God smart, and one of the songs, "Ten Little Indians" (which is wonderfully sung by Emily Young), is catchy enough to hum on the way home. Nor is there the slightest trace of slickness: This is real rock, not the synthetic kind...
I confess to being impressed by the sheer gall, if nothing else, of the producers who decided that it was time to bring back "La Bête." Though it went over well in England, winning an Olivier Award, David Hirson's verse comedy was a disastrous failure on Broadway, where it opened in 1991, was greeted by universal critical catcalls, and closed 25 performances later, draped in ignominy from head to toe. So why in the name of the bottom line is this awful play--for it is truly, excruciatingly awful--back for a second go-round?
The answer is Mark Rylance, who starred in "Boeing-Boeing" and is now giving another over-the-top performance as Valere, a fathomlessly vulgar, monstrously vain street player who has been thrust upon Elomire (David Hyde Pierce), the celebrated 17th-century playwright, and his resident drama troupe by the princess (Joanna Lumley) who is the company's all-powerful patroness. Mr. Rylance comes out belching and gets grosser from there, embellishing virtually every line he speaks with a fresh bit of business from his bottomless bag of comic trickery. Mr. Rylance is one of the finest stage comedians we have, but he has nothing to work with this time around. "La Bête" is a wan pastiche of Molière whose pancake-flat couplets rattle on endlessly, pointlessly and--above all--pretentiously....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted October 15, 12:00 AM
TT: Unforgettable—in more than one way
Hep Records has just released a hitherto-unknown 1949 concert recording by the King Cole Trio. Seeing as how Nat Cole is not only one of the great vocal balladeers but my all-time favorite jazz pianist, it seemed logical to write a "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal taking note of the occasion--but I widened my field of fire to talk about other artists who, like Cole, are exceptionally good at more than one thing:
Sometimes it makes sense, or appears to at first glance, when talented artists choose to take up a second line of creative endeavor. Only on closer inspection does the extent and originality of their achievement become clearer. It may have seemed logical enough in 1971 that Clint Eastwood should have wanted to try his hand at directing "Play Misty for Me"--but who could have predicted that the hottest action star of the '60s and '70s would evolve into the auteur of such emotionally complex films as "A Perfect World" and "Letters from Iwo Jima"? Or that Edgar Degas, who in his lifetime exhibited only one sculpture, "The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer," should have completed several dozen other three-dimensional works discovered after his death in 1917 that are now generally thought to be identical in quality and importance to his paintings?I find it at once inspiring and frustrating to watch a genius pull a second rabbit out of his hat....
Read the whole thing here.
* * *
Nat King Cole performs "Little Girl" in 1950 with Irving Ashby on guitar, Joe Comfort on bass, and Jack Costanzo on conga drum:
Posted October 15, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"I've often felt that life is a hard deal and it's unrelentingly tragic and an uphill fight. But you can on a day walk into a movie house and for an hour-and-a-half see Fred Astaire dancing and escape in it. Then you walk back out of the darkness into the hot sun and into real life. You were at least refreshed. Like stopping in a bar on a hot day and getting a cold beer and you rest for 10 minutes and then go on with your journey. Instead of the Bergmans and filmmakers like that, is it the escapist filmmakers that are making a more practical contribution to life by giving you this respite?"
Woody Allen, interviewed in The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 15, 2010)
Posted October 15, 12:00 AM
October 14, 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)
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, 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)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON 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 CHICAGO:
• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON IN CLEVELAND:
• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• An Ideal Husband (comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY IN LOS ANGELES:
• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, off-Broadway run reviewed here)
Posted October 14, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains."
Marcel Proust, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove)
Posted October 14, 12:00 AM
October 13, 2010
TT: Mamet, with an accent
I review the Broadway premiere of David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre in the Greater New York section of today's Wall Street Journal, and the verdict is mostly very positive. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
David Mamet is the most American of playwrights. Not only do his snarlingly competitive characters take a zero-sum view of human relationships, but they express it with words that fly through the air like bullets in search of a body. So what could have possessed Patrick Stewart--make that Sir Patrick Stewart--to wrestle with "A Life in the Theatre," Mr. Mamet's 1977 play about a pair of actors, one old and one young, who are battling for dominance over one another? Beats me, but I'm glad it did, for Mr. Stewart's performance, strange though it may sound from time to time, is in the end both deeply comprehending and painfully touching, just like the play itself.
I can't think why it took so long for "A Life in the Theatre" to get to Broadway. It's a natural, a two-character comedy with a wrenchingly serious coda and a plum part for a first-class actor who is capable of convincingly portraying a tired old ham. As usual, Mr. Mamet tells us nothing about his characters beyond the words that they speak, but we are, I think, invited to suppose that Robert (Mr. Stewart) and John (T.R. Knight) are working together in the kind of second-rate repertory company that shoves a new production onto the boards every week or two, ready or not. In many of the 26 scenes, we see Robert and John doing their best to stagger through a series of underrehearsed scripts (one of which is a cruelly clever Eugene O'Neill parody). Elsewhere we look on as Robert tries to make John his protégé, hosing him down with gaseous lectures about the craft of theater...
Mr. Stewart plays Robert very much in the English manner, and at first I feared that his pacing would be unidiomatically deliberate (I smiled to hear him wring five finicky syllables out of the word "specifically"). Then I let go of my preconceptions and started watching the performance he was giving instead of the one I wanted to see, and before long I'd stopped keeping score and was enthralled....
* * *
The print version of the Journal's Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of A Life in the Theatre by going here.
Posted October 13, 12:00 AM
TT: Snapshot
Carl Sandburg appears as the mystery guest on a 1960 episode of What's My Line?:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted October 13, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages."
Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain)
Posted October 13, 12:00 AM
October 12, 2010
TT: Entry from an unkept diary
• As I've written elsewhere, I no longer find Neil Simon's plays to be very funny. His insert-flap-A-in-slot-B style of joke-driven comedy strikes me as a rusty relic of the increasingly distant past. But there are those who insist that there's more to Simon than his punchlines, and so I took a look at the 1975 film version of The Sunshine Boys the other day in an attempt to see for myself what his critical advocates see in him. I tried to watch The Sunshine Boys a couple of years ago and couldn't get anywhere with it--but this time I saw the film from a different point of view.
What hit me forcibly on a second viewing was that Willie Clark, the character played in the film by Walter Matthau, is not merely an absent-minded old grouch but is all too clearly suffering from dementia. Yes, Simon plays his confusion for laughs--he plays everything for laughs--but anyone who has spent time with a friend or relative afflicted with Alzheimer's disease will immediately spot the symptoms, which are portrayed with next to no comic exaggeration:
BEN It's Monday, not Wednesday...didn't you know it was Monday?WILLIE I remembered but I forgot.
In 1972, when The Sunshine Boys opened on Broadway, the phrase "Alzheimer's disease" had yet to become part of the national lexicon. I recently shared a platform with Marion Roach, who mentioned in passing that a piece about her mother's battle with Alzheimer's that she wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1983 was, unlikely as it may sound, the first first-person account of the disease ever to be published. A quarter-century later, we all know what Alzheimer's disease is, and damned few of us are inclined to laugh at it.
I still don't think The Sunshine Boys is all that funny, but when you view it not as a comedy but as a drama, the punchlines recede in salience and you find yourself confronted with a portrait of an angry, frightened old man that is fraught with something not far removed from pathos. So given the fact that Neil Simon's plays haven't been doing especially well in revival of late, I find myself wondering: what would The Sunshine Boys be like if it were staged not for laughs but truth, the way that Matthew Warchus staged last year's Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests?
As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of that remarkable production:
Matthew Warchus is well aware of the bleak undertones of "The Norman Conquests." He went so far in a recent interview as to claim that he'd directed the triptych "as if it's Chekhov." I wouldn't go quite as far as that: Mr. Warchus is a master of physical comedy, and each installment is full of the same knockabout antics that can be seen in his production of "God of Carnage," which is currently playing to packed houses on Broadway. But he also understands the delicate art of silence, and "The Norman Conquests" is no less full of moments of stillness when the laughter dies away and all you can hear is the keening sound of sorrow.
Perhaps Simon's play isn't strong enough to stand up to that kind of tough-minded treatment. David Cromer, after all, staged Brighton Beach Memoirs that way, and it closed after just nine performances. But what if some similarly inclined director were to mount The Sunshine Boys not on Broadway but in a small, first-class regional house like, say, Palm Beach Dramaworks or Chicago's Writers' Theatre, where the audience, instead of insisting on being "entertained," would presumably be more willing to go where the production led them?
"If [Simon's] plays continue to be performed," I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Brighton Beach Memoirs, "it will only be because actors and directors have found a new way of performing them, one that cuts through the punch lines to find a deeper, more enduring dramatic truth." Might The Sunshine Boys be the place to start?
* * *
A studio featurette about the making of the film version of The Sunshine Boys:
Posted October 12, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone)
Posted October 12, 12:00 AM
October 11, 2010
TT: Not unlike
The past, we're told, was in color, and I don't doubt that the generation after mine will remember it that way. Mrs. T told me the other day that Ian, our thirteen-year-old nephew, has taken to turning up his nose at black-and-white movies, a form of youthful snobbery that I'd heard about but never previously encountered. Not for him the clean, crisp surreality of the monochrome image: he wants color or nothing. No doubt blood looks better when it's really red.
Me, I like black-and-white movies, and I can recall with embarrassing ease a time when color TV was a rarity reserved for the rich. The earliest color TV sets, which went on sale in 1954, cost $1,295 each, a bit more than ten thousand dollars in today's money. My family, which didn't have that kind of cash to throw around, waited to buy a color set until 1966, the year that all three networks (remember the three networks?) changed over to full-color prime-time broadcast schedules. Prior to that time, the world came to our living room in black and white, and even though commercial color TV had been introduced twelve years earlier, I knew it not. That's why it's natural for me to think of the not-so-distant past as a colorless realm inhabited by great men (and a few women) who now exist only in shades of gray.
It is for this reason that I find myself fascinated by the relatively recent explosion of interest in autochrome, the first color-photography process that was practical enough to be marketed commercially and used by serious photographers. It was in autochrome that the earliest color pictures of famous people were taken, and to see them now is a disorienting, even jolting experience. Alvin Langdon Coburn, for instance, took two autochromes of Mark Twain at his home in Connecticut. Who knew that the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn liked to wear a red robe when reading in bed? Who knew, indeed, that there was any color to him but the gleaming white of the linen suits that were his trademark?
Dwight Eisenhower is another of those historical figures who, though he was photographed countless times in color, seems to be locked into the lost world of shadows. Hence I was hugely surprised to discover that the oldest known color videotape, made in 1958, records a public appearance by none other than Ike himself:
It was far less surprising for me to view the color tape of the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon, after all, was elected president when I was in junior high school. What startled me most about the tape was not that he was (so to speak) a man of color but that, like me, he had once been young:
Most fascinating of all, though, is the fact that the earliest surviving color videotapes of entertainment telecasts should be devoted to the three TV specials featuring Fred Astaire that aired on NBC between 1958 and 1960. Astaire, needless to say, starred in a good many color films, but the movies for which he is best remembered are all in black and white, and to see his dancing preserved via the you-are-there immediacy of videotape is to feel the obscuring veil of the past falling away like a layer of shed skin.
Some clever soul has posted on YouTube an excerpt from Another Evening With Fred Astaire in which the original color video is intercut with a black-and-white film kinescope of the same telecast. If you're too young to know what it felt like to see color TV for the first time, this clip will convey something of that long-lost shock of recognition:
I confess to treasuring the non-entertaining portions of these telecasts as much as, if not more than, the "good" parts. Here, for instance, is part of what you would have seen if you were one of the few people in Wichita, Kansas, who was sufficiently well heeled to own a color TV on October 17, 1958:
Isn't it bewitching to see the car commercials? And to know that Lee Marvin's M Squad and Peter Lawford's The Thin Man got bumped that cool fall night by none other than Fred Astaire?
Alas, there will be no future autochrome-like explosion of interest in early color television, for videotape was so expensive in the late Fifties and early Sixties (an hour-long blank reel cost $300) that all three networks routinely erased and reused tapes that had not been specifically earmarked for preservation. Surviving color video from the Golden Age of Television is thus as rare--and as eerily evocative--as sound recordings from the late nineteenth century.
I find it especially touching that one of those recordings should be a tape of the very last episode of The Howdy Doody Show, which went off the air in 1960. Alas, I never saw Howdy Doody as a child, but even so, I can feel a second-hand hug on my heartstrings as I watch this video:
The world was simpler then, simpler and more reassuring and--yes--less honest. Much was being swept under the rug in 1960, much suffering and much folly, far too much for our collective good. And now? We get color or nothing, with more than enough blood to go around. But while I suppose I'm glad to know what I know about the world, luridly and garishly vivid though it may be, I don't think I would have wanted to know very much of it when I was young--and I'm not at all sure it's a good thing that my nephew already knows some of it.
W.H. Auden said it: Some think they're strong, some think they're smart,/Like butterflies they're pulled apart,/America can break your heart./You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.
* * *
To see the complete 1958 telecast of An Evening With Fred Astaire, go here.
Posted October 11, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon."
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured
Posted October 11, 12:00 AM
October 8, 2010
TT: Suspicious minds
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival, where I saw new productions of Othello and An Ideal Husband. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
When a drama company puts on two shows in alternating repertory, it's smart for the artistic director to pick a pair of scripts that can be played off one another--though not necessarily in an obvious way. You wouldn't think, for instance, that Shakespeare's "Othello" and Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" have much of anything in common, but they prove in practice to be mutually illuminating, bearing as they do on the subject of how suspicion can wreak havoc on a marriage. Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival is mounting handsome stagings of both plays in collaboration with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where the two productions originated this summer, and as I watched them in close succession earlier this week, I was struck by how smoothly they fit together.
Risa Brainin's "Othello" is a modern-dress staging whose reference points are wholly contemporary, all the way from the clamorous action-flick incidental music of Michael Keck to the central-casting performances of the excellent actors: Othello (David Alan Anderson) plays the regular guy gone wrong, Iago (David Anthony Smith) the brash, sarcastic Bill Murray-ish sidekick with a giant chip on his shoulder, Desdemona (Sara M. Bruner) the chirpy innocent who can't believe what's happening to her until it's too late. The results, though unsubtle in the extreme, are also terrifically effective--and not just on their own populist terms, either. This is a blood-and-thunder "Othello" that roars down the track at several hundred miles an hour...
Nearly every production of an Oscar Wilde play that I've seen in recent years has been performed on a set that sought to reproduce more or less literally the Vicwardian décor of Wilde's own time. Not so the Great Lakes Theater Festival's version of "An Ideal Husband," whose simple unit set, designed by Nayna Ramey, consists of a drape, some columns and a half-dozen stage-wide steps, plus enough period chairs to allow the characters to seat themselves as they please. Between the set and Jason Lee Resler's high-society costumes, nothing more is needed to create a look that is at once stylized and stylish.
Sari Ketter, the director, writes in her program note that she conceives of "An Ideal Husband" as a "fairy tale." To that end she fills her sparsely decorated stage with a ballet-like corps of black-clad butlers at whose seemingly magical behest the other actors come and go, a charming conceit executed with the most delicate of touches....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted October 08, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"'We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!' 'Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!' It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it."
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
Posted October 08, 12:00 AM
October 7, 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)
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, 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)
CLOSING SOON 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 CHICAGO:
• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK 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 SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
Posted October 07, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby--I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... 'Betrayal'...'Confrontation'... 'Management'... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas."
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
Posted October 07, 12:00 AM
October 6, 2010
TT: Snapshot
A 1966 TV interview with Bill Evans:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Posted October 06, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins."
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
Posted October 06, 12:00 AM
October 5, 2010
UNTOUCHABLE
"If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H. L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses..."Posted October 05, 9:54 AM
TT: Almanac
"No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable."
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
Posted October 05, 12:00 AM
October 4, 2010
TT: Un-Shaw of themselves
I review the Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway revival of Mrs. Warren's Profession in the Greater New York section of today's Wall Street Journal. It isn't very good. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Nobody ever says the word "prostitution" out loud in George Bernard Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," even though the oldest profession is what it's all about. Small wonder: The play was written in 1894, but nobody dared to perform it on stage until 1902, Victorian prudery being what it was, and it has only been in recent years that "Mrs. Warren's Profession" has been seen at all regularly in this country. Nowadays, though, interest in Shaw's early work is on the upswing, and the Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway revival is the play's third major American mounting so far this year (it was previously presented by California Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C.). Could it be that the once-scandalous, now-titillating subject matter of "Mrs. Warren's Profession" makes it more attractive to modern audiences? I wouldn't be surprised--but I'm sorry to say that the Roundabout's erratic version has little else to offer.
On paper, the Roundabout's "Mrs. Warren" looked like a sure thing. Cherry Jones, who is as accomplished a stage actor as we have today, plays the unapologetically vulgar madam whose "private hotels" are sufficiently profitable to allow her to buy Vivie (Sally Hawkins), her brainy daughter, a place in respectable English society. The staging is by Doug Hughes, who directed Ms. Jones in "Doubt," and the sets are by Scott Pask, whose list of noteworthy design credits is several feet long. In addition to Ms. Jones, the cast includes such familiar faces as Mark Harelik, Edward Hibbert and Michael Siberry.
So what went wrong? Pretty much everything, though by far the worst offender is Ms. Hawkins, a British film and TV actor of some note whose performance as Vivie couldn't be further off the mark. Shaw's stage directions describe Vivie as the quintessential example of "the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman....strong, confident, self-possessed." For Ms. Hawkins to play her as a squeaky, flighty semi-tomboy is thus nonsensical, and the fact that she swallows at least half of her lines renders large chunks of the play all but unintelligible....
* * *
The print version of the Journal's Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of Mrs. Warren's Profession by going here.
Posted October 04, 12:00 AM
TT: Full Cleveland
I'm still on the road, but travel conditions have improved significantly. Not only is Mrs. T with me again, but we're in Cleveland, a town to which we're both partial, where we'll be seeing two shows performed at the Great Lakes Theater Festival and paying a visit to the new and improved Cleveland Museum of Art. Nor are we in our usual tearing hurry to head for elsewhere: we flew into town on Sunday and don't have to leave until Thursday, which happens to be our third wedding anniversary.
Best of all, we've returned to the Penfield House, one of the half-dozen houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that are available for short-term rental. I wrote about the house at length when Mrs. T and I last stayed here a couple of years ago, so I won't repeat myself--suffice it to say that I can't imagine a more satisfying place to live.
I'm also pleased to report that you can't connect to the Web at the Penfield House. You have to drive to the parking lot of a Wendy's that is located a mile from the gate. Normally I'd find this oppressive, but under the circumstances I regard it as downright liberating. We've brought along plenty of books and compact discs, and we mean to turn loose the burdens of dailiness and enjoy being where we are while we're here.
To this end, I guarantee that you will hear nothing whatsoever from me between now and next Monday save for the usual routine almanac entries and theater-related postings (I do have to write my Friday drama column, after all!). My colleagues will do the heavy lifting until I return.
Posted October 04, 12:00 AM
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• Lombardi * (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, 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)
CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Nov. 14, reviewed here)
Posted October 04, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it."
Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
Posted October 04, 12:00 AM
October 1, 2010
TT: A second Scoop
I have two separate drama columns in this morning's Wall Street Journal. In my regular column, which can be found in the Leisure & Arts section, I report on two exceptional Chicago revivals, Tom Stoppard's Night and Day and Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon. Here's an excerpt.
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Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, which specializes in brainy, challenging scripts, is doing a real service to the republic of letters by reviving "Night and Day," the most obscure of Tom Stoppard's major plays. It had only a modest run on Broadway in 1979 and hasn't been performed anywhere in New York since 2001, and I regret to say that I think I know why. Mr. Stoppard's slightly-right-of-center opinions, which are anathema to most theater people, are rather easier than usual to discern from the plot of "Night and Day," in which Dick Wagner (Shawn Douglass), an amiably unscrupulous left-wing foreign correspondent, wanders into an unnamed African country in search of hot copy and stumbles onto a story that blows up in his face....
In truth, though, "Night and Day" isn't so much anti-liberal as anti-totalitarian (though Mr. Stoppard does see the closed shop as a form of totalitarianism, a point of view that will make him few friends on the left). It's also witty and heartfelt, especially in its sharp-eyed but sympathetic portrayal of Ruth Carson (Linda Gillum), an expatriate of a certain age whose too-placid marriage to an older man (played by David Darlow) has given her a wandering eye. The whole thing adds up to a modern-day counterpart of "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh's cynical fantasia about the hijinks of British journalists abroad, except that Mr. Stoppard's play is more serious, more realistic and much more moving.
This revival, directed by James Bohnen, the company's outgoing artistic director, is so good that it could be transplanted to Broadway exactly as is. The actors, many of whom have appeared together in other Remy Bumppo productions, work in awe-inspiring concord...
The more I see of Chicago's TimeLine Theatre Company, the more impressed I am by the way in which it goes about its self-defined task of producing historical dramas "that connect with today's social and political issues." That may sound like an eat-your-spinach-and-like it mission statement, but TimeLine takes great care to choose interesting plays, then mounts them in its 87-seat theater with a combination of panache and flamboyant physical dynamism that I find irresistible.
TimeLine's stripped-down stagings of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys" and Aaron Sorkin's "The Farnsworth Invention," a pair of smart but slick plays that didn't quite add up when I saw them on Broadway, were unequivocally superior to the original productions. Now the company has taken on a tougher nut, the Chicago premiere of Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," a docudrama about the 1977 TV interviews in which David Frost grilled Richard Nixon about Watergate and got him to admit on camera that he'd "let the American people down." Superficial though it is, "Frost/Nixon" profited on Broadway and in London from a brilliant staging by Michael Grandage and an unforgettable portrayal of Nixon by Frank Langella, who repeated his performance in Ron Howard's 2008 film version of the play.
How do you top that? You don't. Instead, TimeLine has put a totally different, identically persuasive spin on "Frost/Nixon" by presenting it not in a Broadway-sized house but in an attention-focusing space that is itself scarcely bigger than a TV studio. Keith Pitts' semi-circular set subtly evokes the Oval Office from which Nixon retreated in disgrace, and Mike Tutaj's rear-wall projections transport the viewer from place to place with discreet finesse....
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Read the whole thing here.
Posted October 01, 12:00 AM
TT: They can't dance (don't ask them)
My second drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal, which appears in the Greater New York section, is a review of the Broadway transfer of The Pitmen Painters. Very much to my surprise, I liked it. Here's an excerpt.
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If you flipped over "Billy Elliot," then the Manhattan Theatre Club is clearly hoping that you'll do a double backflip for "The Pitmen Painters," a new play by Lee Hall, who wrote the book for the hit musical about an English coal miner's son who becomes a ballet dancer. This time around, Mr. Hall has given us a fictionalized version of the real-life story of the Ashington Group of Unprofessional Artists, a bunch of Depression-era miners who took a course in art appreciation and subsequently became famous painters (though only briefly so--they're forgotten today) while continuing to dig coal. The difference is that nobody in "The Pitmen Painters" wears toe shoes or lifts his voice in song to express the heartfelt hope that Margaret Thatcher will fry in hell. Otherwise, the two shows are strikingly similar, both being political tearjerkers that are deeply rooted in the labyrinthine peculiarities of the British class system. In fact, there's only one significant difference between them: "The Pitmen Painters" is good.
Not great, you understand, so don't be fooled by the near-hysterical quotes from London's critical corps that have been trotted out as sucker bait for Manhattan theatergoers. Stripped of the finger-wagging socialist sermonizing that spoils the last ten minutes of the play, "The Pitmen Painters" is a "Full Monty"-type commercial comedy about five working-class blokes with inch-thick accents ("We just want to knaa aboot proper art") who turn out to be smarter, nobler and more talented than Robert Lyon (Ian Kelly), the well-meaning but unconsciously patronizing university man who deigns to introduce them to the joys of painting. But if you don't mind going along with Mr. Hall and the accomplished ensemble cast that executes his well-worn tricks, you'll find "The Pitmen Painters" to be both entertaining and touching--as well as unexpectedly intelligent whenever the characters discuss the art form that has changed their lives....
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The print version of the Journal's Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of The Pitmen Painters by going here.
Posted October 01, 12:00 AM
TT: Heard about any great plays lately?
Yes, I have three pieces in today's Wall Street Journal! Starting this morning, my biweekly "Sightings" column about the arts in America will appear in the Leisure & Arts section of the Friday Journal (instead of the Saturday paper, which has just been extensively redesigned). In my first Friday column, I talk about...well, see for yourself. Here's an excerpt.
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Sometimes a passing comment can be more telling than a considered one. In reviewing the recent New York premiere of "Me, Myself & I," Edward Albee's latest play, I remarked that "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." A number of readers wrote to me about that observation, and their reactions can be boiled down into a one-word reply: Really? So I gave it some additional thought, and the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I'd inadvertently put my finger on something that is of relevance not just to Mr. Albee's career, but to the increasingly shaky standing of high culture in postmodern America....
Forty-eight years after the fact, it's easy to forget that the controversy that greeted the premiere of "Virginia Woolf," which in 1962 was thought by many Americans to be frank to the point of obscenity, made Edward Albee famous. How famous? Enough so that Johnny Carson invited him onto "The Tonight Show" four years later to promote his latest play, "A Delicate Balance." (He shared the Carson couch with Duke Ellington.) Not long afterward, Life magazine published a lengthy, lavishly illustrated profile of Mr. Albee. In the '60s, you couldn't get much more famous than that....
Back then, the national media still devoted a considerable amount of time and space to covering high culture. Even if you didn't live in New York, you could still read a review of an important play in a weekly newsmagazine, watch a scene being performed by the original cast on "The Ed Sullivan Show" or see the author being interviewed on "Tonight" or "Today." Moreover, wire-service coverage of big-city cultural events was routinely carried by local newspapers throughout the country. As a result, it was possible well into the '70s for a high-culture artist to become known to the public at large....
No more. The national media have mostly stopped covering high culture--nowadays they are besotted by Hollywood--meaning that it is no longer possible for an artist like Mr. Albee to win true fame....
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Read the whole thing here.
Posted October 01, 12:00 AM
TT: Almanac
"It is known to every newspaper publisher of the slightest professional intelligence; successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend any one or any thing if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing some one or something else. The plan never fails."
H.L. Mencken, "The American Magazine"
Posted October 01, 12:00 AM