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February 28, 2011

TT: Man at work

I was going to tell you all about my visit to Palm Beach, but instead I spent the evening working on Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-man-two-character play about Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, his manager. Now that I've seen two readings of the play in front of a pair of live audiences, I've cut ten pages out of what was originally a sixty-six-page script, written a new speech for Glaser, and done some restructuring of the first act. (The second act worked pretty much as is.) I think that's enough for one night, don't you?

More about my adventures in Palm Beach--and my current trip to New York--in the next day or two. In the meantime, hang loose.

Posted February 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."

W.H. Auden, "Notes on the Comic" (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted February 28, 12:00 AM

February 25, 2011

TT: Playing it safe—and smart

In today's Wall Street Journal I review Orlando Shakespeare Theater's productions of Pride and Prejudice and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Now that America's economic woes have forced regional theaters to play it as safely as possible, their artistic directors must grapple with a tough question: How to be both safe and stimulating? Florida's Orlando Shakespeare Theater has responded to the challenge by offering its patrons a mini-season of rotating repertory in which two warhorses, "Pride and Prejudice" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and are being presented in smart, cliché-free stagings.

I confess to having previously gone out of my way to avoid stage versions of "Pride and Prejudice." I love Jane Austen's most popular novel (who doesn't?), but it's been adapted so many times in so many different media that I couldn't see the point of yet another version. Moreover, I find that plays based on classic novels tend to be stiff and stagy. So I'm pleasantly surprised to report that Jon Jory has done a top-notch job of turning "Pride and Prejudice" into a play.

Mr. Jory, who founded Louisville's Humana Festival of New American plays, adapted the novel in 2005, and since then his version has been performed throughout America. I can see why. While it requires a cast of 19, the scenic demands are modest--Orlando Shakespeare did the show with ten gilded chairs and a couple of footstools--and Mr. Jory has trimmed and shaped the book into a swift-moving script that gives directors plenty of room to maneuver. Thomas Ouellette's light-footed, virtuosically coordinated staging flows as smoothly as a ballet and has just the right amount of comic crackle....

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is performed on the same unit set as "Pride and Prejudice," a two-story country-house façade painted to look like a summer sky that overlooks a wide-open playing area. Not only is it acted by the same group of players, but both shows have been cast similarly. Michele Vazquez and Courtney Moors, for instance, play Elizabeth and Jane in "Pride and Prejudice" and Hermia and Helena in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," while Michael Daly does double duty as Mr. Collins and Bottom. This approach gives a strong feeling of unity to the season: You immediately see the artistic point of presenting the two shows in tandem.

On the other hand, the productions couldn't be more different in tone. Whereas Mr. Ouellette's "Pride and Prejudice" is crisp and classical, David Lee has deliberately emphasized the farce-like elements in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," staging the scenes for the four young lovers as a long, seamless arc of comic action whose propulsive physical energy I found exhilarating. Ms. Vazquez and Ms. Moors are wholly charming in "Pride and Prejudice," but they really come into their own here. I don't know when I've seen two such naturally gifted young stage comediennes...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."

Samuel Johnson, letter to Hester Thrale, Sept. 21, 1773

Posted February 25, 12:00 AM

February 24, 2011

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)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)
• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, extended through Apr. 24, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, extended through Apr. 10, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, Washington remounting of Chicago production, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 10, Chicago run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MINNEAPOLIS:
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, Minneapolis remounting of Phoenix production, adult subject matter and violence, closes Mar. 6, Phoenix run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WINTER GARDEN, FLA.:
• Shhhh! (farce, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

Posted February 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The soul of the journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases."

William Hazlitt, "On Going a Journey"

Posted February 24, 12:00 AM

February 23, 2011

TT: Snapshot

Ernie Kovacs' Eugene, originally telecast on ABC in 1961:

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

Posted February 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sightseeing.'"

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America

Posted February 23, 12:00 AM

February 22, 2011

TT: A peek into the workshop

I posted last month about the new aria for Danse Russe that Paul Moravec and I are writing. It's for the character of Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes. In it he describes how it feels to be an impresario who cannot create a work of art on his own.

I thought you might enjoy reading the text, which I wrote in a hotel room in Sarasota a few weeks ago and which Paul is now setting to music in his studio in Manhattan.

* * *

DIAGHILEV (speaking) And there they go. Full of excitement, full of ideas, sure of themselves--and sure they don't need me. You heard them. (Imitating STRAVINSKY) "He thinks he knows everything--but he knows nothing."

(Singing) No one will ever know
What happens before the curtain rises.
All the people see is the show,
And no one will ever know
The struggles and the fears
Of the man everyone despises.
My work, my life,
They'll slip through the fingers
Of memory,
And no one will ever know
What I did,
What I do,
How I make them all come through.
(With mock grandiosity, quoting himself) "I am the impresario,
The man behind the scenes.
I put the players in the pit,
The dancers on the stage..."
(Wistfully) I dream of things,
Beautiful things
That no one in the world
Has ever done or seen.
They flash before my sleeping eyes
Like pictures on a screen--
But not quite clear enough,
Never, ever clear enough,
And then...
Only then...

He gestures to the left, then to the right. STRAVINSKY and NIJINSKY appear from opposite sides of the stage, carrying sticks to which marionette strings are attached. The strings are attached to their bodies. They hand the sticks to DIAGHILEV, who starts to manipulate the two men.

(Briskly) Do this! Do that!
Let's try a different hat!
The pas de deux is boring
And the clarinets are flat!
The steps are trite,
The tune's not right,
Fix everything
And fix it now--
We open tonight!

He hands the sticks back to STRAVINSKY and NIJINSKY, who exit.

I cannot dance,
I cannot sing,
I cannot write the simplest melody--
But I can hire a hall
And bring men together
To paint all the pictures
That flash through my mind
In the silence of the night--
But not quite clear enough,
Never, ever clear enough.
Without them, I'm nothing.
Without me, they're...
(Speaking, with a touch of irony) Something.
But something different,
Maybe better, maybe worse--
But different.
(Singing) And no one will ever know
What I did,
What I do,
How I make them all come through,
How I help them to see
What is new,
What is true.

Posted February 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be late for the one before."

G.K. Chesterton, "The Prehistoric Railway Station"

Posted February 22, 12:00 AM

February 21, 2011

TT: Hither, yon, and back again

Mrs. T and I are in Melbourne, Florida, this morning, sitting on the balcony of a room in a beachfront hotel and listening contentedly to the waves. A little later today we'll drive back to Winter Park, where I have three days' worth of work to do. Among other things, I've finished outlining the fifth chapter of my Duke Ellington biography, and it's just about time to start writing.

As for our weekend by the sea, allow me to quote myself:

Coming as I do from the middle of America, I find at the age of forty-nine that I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of nights I've slept by an ocean. Like everyone who falls in love with the sea in adulthood, I'm incapable of saying anything about it that hasn't been said a million times before: its ever-changing, self-renewing presence instantly reduces me to clichés. As I sat on the boardwalk and watched the waves that my beloved Fairfield Porter painted so well, I could do no better than to recall the words of Jean de la Ville de Mirmont that Gabriel Fauré set to music with such exquisitely apposite simplicity in L'horizon chimérique, the most perfect of all his song cycles: The sea is infinite and my dreams are wild.

I wrote that paragraph five years ago. I've slept by the sea quite a few more nights since writing it, but otherwise I stand by every word.

On Thursday I head south for the premiere of Steven Caras: See Them Dance, Deborah Novak's documentary about the dancer-photographer, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. at Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach. I'm in the film, and I'll also be conducting an onstage interview with Steve and Deborah immediately after the screening. This is an article about the film that appeared in yesterday's Palm Beach Daily News.

For more information about the screening, go here.

On Friday morning I resume Pops-related activities one more time in order to take part in the latest installment of Parker Ladd's Author Breakfast Series at the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach. I'm making a joint appearance with Stacy Schiff, the author of Cleopatra: A Life. The two of us will be talking about and signing copies of our respective books over breakfast at Café Boulud. Reservations are required for this $100-a-ticket event, which kicks off at 8:45 a.m. This is an article about the series that appeared last November in the Palm Beach Daily News.

Yes, I'm a little staggered. So far as I know, nobody in the world has ever paid a hundred bucks to see me talk, though the price of the ticket also includes breakfast, valet parking, and a copy of one of our books, which makes the whole thing sound a bit less implausible. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing whether anybody shows up!

For more information, go here.

On Saturday I return to Winter Park, where I'll be conducting a public interview with John Sinclair, the artistic director and conductor of Winter Park's Bach Festival Society concerts. John is leading a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Mozart's C Minor Mass on Sunday afternoon, and I'll be chatting with him about the experience of rehearsing and conducting the program. Our joint appearance is at Rollins College's Bush Auditorium at 7:30 p.m.

Admission is free, but space is limited, so go here to reserve a seat.

And what about Sunday? Well, I'll cross that bridge--or, rather, fly that plane--when I come to it....

* * *

Listen to Gérard Souzay and Jacqueline Bonneau perform Fauré's L'horizon chimérique:

Posted February 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"To travel hopefully is better than to arrive."

Robert Louis Stevenson. "El Dorado"

Posted February 21, 12:00 AM

February 18, 2011

TT: Too much of a good thing

In today's Wall Street Journal I review two shows, The Diary of a Madman at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater and Shhhh! at Garden Theatre in Winter Garden, Florida. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Everyone knows what Geoffrey Rush has been up to lately, but when he's not giving Oscar-nominated performances in movies about stuttering kings, he can frequently be seen on the stage. His first such appearance in New York, in the 2009 Broadway revival of Eugène Ionesco's "Exit the King," won him a Tony. Now he's back in town, playing another man at the end of his rope. "The Diary of a Madman" is David Holman's stage version of Nikolai Gogol's 1835 short story about an obscure civil servant who goes mad and proclaims himself to be the King of Spain. No one will be surprised to hear that Mr. Rush, who won an Oscar playing a schizophrenic in "Shine," gives a spectacularly flamboyant performance as Poprishchin, a Clerk of the Ninth Grade who spends his days trimming quill pens and dreaming of glory. But in spite of all the excitement that Mr. Rush is stirring up at the BAM Harvey Theater, I can't say that I found "The Diary of a Madman" to be convincing, much less moving.

Part of what's wrong with this production, which has been staged to the hilt and back again by Neil Armfield, the director of "Exit the King," is its underlying premise. Gogol's story, a monologue in which we behold madness bursting into flower, is a masterpiece of dramatic economy. Not one of its eight thousand words is wasted. To present it on the stage, all you have to do is read it out loud in a setting of the utmost simplicity, letting the text do the work. Mr. Holman's adaptation, on the other hand, erects a massive, self-consciously theatrical superstructure on top of the story...Mr. Rush is made up to look like a decayed, eye-shadowed dandy in a tattered velvet suit. Nothing is left to the imagination: All of Gogol's effects are spelled out with the utmost explicitness.

The same is true of Mr. Rush's frenetic performance, which is a tour de force in both the best and worst senses of the phrase. He flutters around like a demented marionette, embroidering every line with brilliantly ingenious tricks at which you cannot help but gape admiringly--but which distract you from Poprishchin's desperate plight....

Farce usually relies on a mixture of high-speed dialogue and high-energy physical action, but PB&J Theatre Factory, a company of Florida actors who write their own material, has pulled a switch on the classic formula in "Shhhh!" In this four-door farce, a pair of Laurel-and-Hardyesque jewel thieves who are on the lam hide out in a rundown hotel that looks empty but turns out to be fully occupied with a diverse collection of peculiar people. What makes "Shhhh!" so fresh is that there's no dialogue: The characters emit cries of pain and horror and utter isolated words here and there, but beyond that, nobody says anything. The comedy is entirely physical and enormously clever...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Good and popular

Today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column is a tribute to George Shearing. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

George Shearing, who died on Monday, was a great jazz pianist. For much of his long lifetime, he was also one of the 20th century's most successful entertainers, a purveyor of super-smooth easy-listening music that was distinguishable from Muzak only because he played it with perfect taste. That was part of what made him so admirable an artist: Even when he was making music for the masses, he did it without a hint of condescension.

Mr. Shearing, who was born in England in 1919, started out as a standard-issue swing-era piano player. Then he moved to the U.S. in 1947, heard what the boppers were doing on 52nd Street, and decided to do likewise. Blessed with an ear sharp enough to hear a gnat shrug, he easily mastered bop's complex vocabulary, but decided that it was too abrasive to give pleasure to ordinary listeners. In 1949 he put together a quintet with an offbeat instrumentation--piano, vibraphone, guitar, bass and drums--that played everything from pretty-pretty ballads to such hell-for-leather bebop anthems as Denzil Best's "Move." He kept the textures light and the solos concise, and the public, not surprisingly, loved what it heard. "September in the Rain," the quintet's first single, sold nearly a million copies....

Mr. Shearing's willingness to work both sides of the street vexed jazz critics, who are not an especially tolerant lot, and by the '60s he had been written off as a popularizer. In fact, though, he was something completely different, a dead-serious artist who enjoyed playing well-crafted music that was accessible to a popular audience. One of my favorite Shearing records is a quintet-plus-strings performance of "Early Autumn" from a 1961 album called, believe it or not, "Satin Affair." Yes, it's elevator music--but if you don't respond to its elegance, then you're not paying attention....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy."

E.B. White, "A Report in January"

Posted February 18, 12:00 AM

February 17, 2011

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)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)
• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Mar. 13, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN MINNEAPOLIS:
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, Minneapolis remounting of Phoenix production, adult subject matter and violence, closes Mar. 6, Phoenix run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted February 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep."

E.B. White, foreword to the revised edition of One Man's Meat

Posted February 17, 12:00 AM

February 16, 2011

TT: Snapshot

Arturo Toscanini conducts the NBC Symphony in the prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, originally telecast in 1951:

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

Posted February 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

E.B. White, letter to Mary Virginia Parrish (Aug. 29, 1969)

Posted February 16, 12:00 AM

February 15, 2011

TT: O tempora, o mores!

William Schuman, the composer of New England Triptych, appears as a mystery guest on What's My Line? in 1962:

Posted February 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed."

E.B. White, letter to Carrie A. Wilson (May 1, 1951)

Posted February 15, 12:00 AM

February 14, 2011

TT: George Shearing, R.I.P.

George Shearing, who in his day was both an immensely popular and an impeccably tasteful jazz pianist, died this morning at the age of ninety-one. I wrote at length about him for the New York Times in 2002. That piece was quoted in this morning's Associated Press obituary. Here's the relevant part:

Bad habits die hard, but now that ''crossover'' is no longer a dirty word, the time has come for George Shearing to be acknowledged not as a commercial purveyor of bop-and-water, but as an exceptionally versatile artist who has given pleasure to countless listeners for whom such critical hair-splitting is irrelevant. At 82, he is still active, still witty and still playing piano with the same luminous touch that put him on the map back when 52nd Street was lined with grubby little nightclubs instead of jumbo office towers. May he never stop swinging.

He never did.

* * *
.
The George Shearing Quintet plays Denzil Best's "Move":

Posted February 14, 2:52 PM

TT: Lashed to the mast

Early on Saturday evening I finished editing the 16,000-word, seventy-one-page first draft of the fourth chapter of my Duke Ellington biography. (To give you some perspective on this piece of work, my Wall Street Journal drama columns are about 850 words long.) This section of the book takes Ellington from the fall of 1926, when he made his first electrical recordings and signed a management contract with Irving Mills, to the summer of 1929, when he made his Broadway debut.

It was a long, backbreakingly complicated chapter to write, not merely because it deals with one of the most eventful and consequential periods of Ellington's life, but because I also had to write concise character sketches of Mills and seven key players in the Ellington band who were hired during this time: Barney Bigard, Wellman Braud, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Freddie Jenkins, Tricky Sam Nanton, and Cootie Williams. In addition, I had to describe the Cotton Club, where Ellington's band made its debut at the end of 1927, and write extended discussions of three important Ellington recordings, "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," "Black and Tan Fantasy," and "Creole Love Call."

To pack so much material into the span of a single chapter is an alarmingly difficult conceptual feat. To do it without having the results seem dry and fact-crammed is more difficult still. In order to avoid the latter fate, I devoted a couple of pages to a description of what America was like in 1927, and I confess to liking the results:

Nineteen twenty-seven was a rich year for American culture. It was the year of Show Boat, The General, Elmer Gantry, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," Aaron Copland's jazz-flavored Piano Concerto, Stuart Davis' equally jazzy "Egg Beater No. 1," and the last volume of H.L. Mencken's Prejudices. Charles Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in May, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August. For those who knew how to make it, there was money to burn: Babe Ruth earned $70,000 playing for the Yankees, the equivalent of $857,000 today. (A laborer at Fisher Body's assembly plant in Flint, Michigan, made $1,783.) You could buy a loaf of bread for nine cents, a copy of Time for fifteen cents, a raccoon coat for $40, an Atwater Kent radio for $70, or a Model T for $290. Radio was big, but the phonograph was bigger: one hundred million records were sold in America, and among them were Louis Armstrong's "Potato Head Blues" and Bix Beiderbecke's "Singin' the Blues."

The entertainment listings in the "Goings On About Town" section of the December 3 issue of The New Yorker read like a magic carpet ride. On Broadway Katharine Cornell was starring in Somerset Maugham's The Letter, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, and Fred and Adele Astaire in George and Ira Gershwin's Funny Face. If you felt like taking in a movie, you could check out The Jazz Singer, which had opened in October and was still going strong, though the magazine's anonymous critic gave it a mixed notice: "Al Jolson superb in the Vitaphone which accompanies this dull movie." Alfred Stieglitz was showing works by John Marin, America's first cubist painter, at Room 303, the photographer's modernism-friendly art gallery. Among the books reviewed in the magazine that week was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and the list of recommended new titles for Christmas shoppers included Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Ernest Hemingway's Men Without Women, and P.G. Wodehouse's Carry On, Jeeves.

"Goings On About Town," however, had not yet discovered the Cotton Club. The only Harlem nightspots mentioned in the December 3 issue, and for many more issues to come, were Barron's Exclusive Club, Small's Paradise, and Club Ebony. "The later the better, and do not dress," the magazine advised readers interested in visiting Harlem. A week later Lois Long, the wife of society cartoonist Peter Arno and the cabaret correspondent of The New Yorker, whose "Tables for Two" column she wrote under the fey pseudonym of "Lipstick," announced that "I am mad at Harlem. It is getting too refined. All the Harlemites are getting a little ashamed of the Black Bottom, that quaint old native dance handed down by levee-working grandfathers...Give me a Holy Rollers meeting any time. Or Small's. Or, possibly, the Ebony."

The New Yorker had only just started to cover "Popular Records" in 1927, and the reviewer who wrote about them seemed not to have heard any black musicians. (He favored Ben Bernie and the Clicquot Club Eskimos.) Indeed, one could read The New Yorker for month after month without running across a single hint that black people of any kind existed, though a couple of weeks later a poetess named Frances Park opined on "Harlem 1927": A slim brown girl/With a heart of flame/Will never admit/She feels it shame/To be dark of skin/With ink-black hair,/Nor wish she were/As the white folk there. But "Lipstick," unlike her colleagues, knew her way around certain parts of Harlem, and she also knew that certain of its nightspots were friendlier than others to visitors from downtown. In due course "Goings On About Town" started advising its readers to stick to Connie's Inn and Small's unless you have "a friend who'll personally conduct you." A week later, the advice was more candid: "Better find a friend who knows his way about; the liveliest places don't welcome unknown whites."

That part was fun to write, though it was also damned hard work.

If I had to guess, I'd say that I've now written between a fourth and a third of the book, not counting source notes. My schedule for the next couple of weeks is awfully hectic, so I doubt that I'll be plunging straight into the next chapter. But I'm far ahead of schedule, and I mean to stay that way.

By the way, I also saw two shows, wrote two drama columns, paid a visit to an artists' colony, made several fixes to the libretto for Danse Russe, and turned fifty-five last week. I did, however, take yesterday off!

* * *

The Ellington band plays "Old Man Blues" in Check and Double Check, filmed in 1930. The trumpet soloist is Freddie Jenkins:

Posted February 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

E.B. White, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor

Posted February 14, 12:00 AM

February 11, 2011

TT: I'd rather be in Philadelphia

In this morning's Wall Street Journal I report on a Phildelphia show, the Arden Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Six decades after his death, Eugene O'Neill is still widely considered to be America's greatest playwright--but productions of his major plays are growing fewer and farther between. Only four O'Neill revivals have been mounted on Broadway in the past decade, and major regional productions aren't much more common. Hence Philadelphia's Arden Theatre is swimming upstream by performing "A Moon for the Misbegotten," O'Neill's last completed play, which I haven't seen since the 2007 Broadway version that starred Kevin Spacey and Eve Best. I liked it well enough then, but I liked it a lot more in Philadelphia.

Why has O'Neill gone out of fashion? Because his plays are usually long-winded and almost always devoid of poetry. His characters talk and talk (the original production of "Mourning Becomes Electra" ran for six hours) without ever getting around to saying anything memorable. I looked O'Neill up in "The Yale Book of Quotations" the other day and found just five entries, only four of which are from his plays and the most famous of which is remembered because it was the first line that Greta Garbo ever spoke on screen: "Gimme a whiskey--ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby." That's not what I call quotable, much less poetic.

"A Moon for the Misbegotten" suffers from both of these problems, and by all rights they ought to kill it stone dead. Not only does the play open with an hour and a half of wholly unnecessary exposition, but there's not a quotable line in it--not even in the second half, which is when O'Neill finally steps on the gas pedal and gets moving. But what started out as a stage-Irish yukfest then turns into a deeply compassionate study of a drunken ex-actor (Eric Hissom) and a poor, unattractive farm girl (Grace Gonglewski) who are too proud to let themselves love one another, and almost before you know it you find yourself caught up in their plight.

Ms. Gonglewski is by all accounts one of Philadelphia's top actors, and in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" you can see how she got that reputation. Performing in a subtly padded costume that makes her look much more broad-beamed than she is in real life, she plays the part of Josie Hogan with a force and authority worthy of the way that O'Neill describes her character in the play's stage directions: "She is so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak...She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labor of two ordinary men. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman." Ms. Best's performance on Broadway was phenomenal, but Ms. Gonglewski doesn't have to make any apologies: She comes on like a typhoon....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 11, 12:00 AM

TT: You'll just have to wait

If you're curious, I explain at the end of today's Wall Street Journal drama column why we didn't review Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark this week. Here's what I wrote:

Contrary to any impression you might have garnered from the reviews that appeared on Tuesday in other publications, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" is still in public previews, is still being rehearsed and is still undergoing changes, some of which may prove to be significant. The official opening date is Mar. 15. Critics will not be invited to see it until a few days prior to that date, after the show has assumed its final form and has been "frozen" by Julie Taymor, the director and co-author. In keeping with this long-standing professional courtesy, I have not seen "Spider-Man" and won't do so until the show is officially frozen. My review will run on Mar. 16.

More next month....

Posted February 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man."

Wilfrid Sheed, review of Letters of E.B. White

Posted February 11, 12:00 AM

February 10, 2011

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)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)
• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Mar. 13, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN MINNEAPOLIS:
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, Minneapolis remounting of Phoenix production, adult subject matter and violence, closes Mar. 6, Phoenix run reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

Posted February 10, 12:00 AM

TT: If this doesn't make you laugh, you're dead

Louis Armstrong and Rex Harrison sing Cole Porter's "Now You Has Jazz" in 1957:

(No, I didn't know about this clip when I wrote Pops!)

Posted February 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Jean's undoing, in my view, was nothing as humdrum as booze or tobacco or malnourishment, but a deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism, and which I think she loathed in herself."

Wilfrid Sheed, "Miss Jean Stafford"

Posted February 10, 12:00 AM

February 9, 2011

TT: Grandfather knows best

I review the premiere of A.R. Gurney's new play, Black Tie, in the Greater New York section of today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, nor can any playwright, however gifted, hope to produce them every time he sits down at his desk. It is in the nature of things that there must also be well-made pieces of intelligent entertainment to keep our fancies tickled, and there must be enough of them to keep actors from standing on unemployment lines and critics from going mad with boredom. Therefore let us now praise A.R. Gurney, who writes a play or two each year, some of them inspired, others merely solid, but all guaranteed to send you home feeling that you wasted neither time nor money by seeing them. "Black Tie," Mr. Gurney's latest effort, falls into the second class, scoring 100% on the intelligent-entertainment checklist.

"Black Tie" is the latest of Mr. Gurney's reports from the land of the upper-middle-class WASP. The scene is a decent but undistinguished hotel in the Adirondacks where Curtis (Gregg Edelman) is about to throw a rehearsal dinner for his soon-to-be-wed son (Ari Brand). As he dons evening dress and mulls over his speech, the ghost of Curtis' own late father (Daniel Davis) materializes to cheer him on and brush up his vocabulary: "Gentlemen wear trousers. Gents wear pants." It soon emerges that Curtis needs a lot of cheering, for his son is about to marry a woman of multicolored hue who disdains the gentleman's code that Curtis learned from his genial but ever-so-proper father....

One of the things I admire about Mr. Gurney is his iron professionalism. While "Black Tie" is slight by comparison with "The Grand Manner," his last play, or "Sylvia," which was so engagingly revived last month by Florida Repertory Theatre, it's much more than sufficiently amusing. It never surprised me, but it never bored me....

* * *

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 by going here.

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

An extremely rare kinescope of a 1957 episode of the short-lived TV version of Vic and Sade, Paul Rhymer's comic radio serial, which was heard on network radio from 1932 to 1946:

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

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The desire not to destroy the palace but to move into it oneself has always been the occupational curse of revolutionaries."

Wilfrid Sheed, "Writers' Politics"

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

February 8, 2011

CAAF: The worst houseguests in the world

In 1822, Leigh Hunt, his pregnant wife and their six children moved into the ground floor of Lord Byron's house in Pisa. As one scholar notes, "the [Hunt] children were encouraged to express their personalities rather than to submit to discipline." Byron put it more colorfully, referring to the kids as "six little blackguards."

But it's Marianne Hunt's own record of the stay that makes me laugh. From an 1822 diary entry:

Mr. Hunt was much annoyed by Lord Byron behaving so meanly about the Children disfiguring his house, which his nobleship chose to very severe upon. How much I wish I could esteem him more! It is so painful, to be under any obligation to a person you cannot esteem! Can anything be more absurd than a peer of the realm--and a poet--making such a fuss about three or four children disfiguring the walls of a few rooms. The very children would blush for him, fye Lord B.--fye.

Such a fuss about the disfigurement of only a few rooms! Fye!

Posted February 08, 12:01 AM

CAAF: From Chekhov's notebooks

Instead of sheets--dirty tablecloths.

The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.

They were mineral water bottles with preserved cherries in them.

In the bill preserved by the hotel-keeper was, among other things: "Bugs--fifteen kopecks."

He picked his teeth and put the toothpick back into the glass.

A private room in a restaurant. A rich man, tying his napkin round his neck, touching the sturgeon with his fork: "At least I'll have a snack before I die"--and he has been saying this for a long time, daily.

If you wish women to love you, be original, I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

Entries quoted by James Wood in his essay "What Chekhov Meant By Life," from The Broken Estate.

Posted February 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics."

Wilfrid Sheed, In Love with Daylight

Posted February 08, 12:00 AM

February 7, 2011

TT: The double nickel

I turned fifty-five on Sunday. Fifty-five was old when I was a boy. People back then used to settle into old age more quickly and, I think, somewhat more willingly. Now it's the least noteworthy of landmarks--except for today's demographers, who know it as the near side of the baby boom.

I read a sobering piece the other day about how boomers are so reluctant to admit the fact of their inexorably increasing age that marketers have been forced to accommodate them by resorting to what can only be described as systematic euphemism:

The generation that sent diaper sales soaring in the 1960s, bought power suits in the 1980s and indulged in luxury cars in the 2000s is getting ready to retire: The oldest boomers turn 65 this year. To accommodate their best customers' needs, American companies are overhauling product lines, changing their marketing and redesigning store layouts.

But there's a catch: Baby boomers, famously demanding and rebellious, don't want anyone suggesting they're old.

"We don't do anything to remind boomers that they are getting older," says Ken Romanzi, North America chief operating officer at Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc., which has targeted the health-conscious generation as its primary consumer base....

Bathroom-fixture maker Kohler Co. struggled to come up with a more palatable word for "grab bar," which boomers resist. It introduced the "Belay" shower handrail--named for the rock-climbing technique--which blends subtly into the wall of a tiled shower. "When you say, 'We've got beautiful grab bars,' [boomers] just say, 'Naw,' because they don't want to identify as needing that," says Diana Schrage, senior interior designer at Kohler's design center.

I suppose I shouldn't be too terribly surprised that a generation that grew up singing I hope I die before I get old has started to succumb to such undignified terror, though I may well find myself similarly disposed a decade from now. For the moment I'm perfectly delighted to be fifty-five, partly because I didn't expect to make it here five years ago and partly because my life since then has been a more or less nonstop adventure.

Regular readers of this blog won't need to be told what I've been up to, but if you're dropping in for the first time, here's a capsule guide to current events:

• My first opera libretto was successfully premiered by a major company a year and a half ago, and my second one will be produced in April.

• I published a best-selling biography a year ago and am now hard at work on what I hope will be an equally well-received sequel.

• I just wrote and directed my first play, and got the idea for another one a couple of days ago.

• On top of all this, I have the best day job in the world, and five years ago I met the woman who is now my wife.

Mrs. T, as it happens, is my near-coeval--she's four days younger than me--and we plan to celebrate our dual birthdays and good fortune in an appropriate manner later this week.

I flew up to New York on Saturday morning to see a new play about a middle-aged WASP. I had lunch with a new friend and dinner with an old one, both of whom assured me that the best is yet to come. I certainly hope so, but I don't see how it could be much better than the last five years have been.

I'm a lucky guy, married to a lucky gal. May our luck hold.

* * *

The Who play "My Generation" at Woodstock in 1969:

Posted February 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all--what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page--do they want someone to write on it?

Wilfrid Sheed, interview, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1987

Posted February 07, 12:00 AM

February 4, 2011

TT: The saddest story

Today's Wall Street Journal is devoted in its entirety to a review of the new off-Broadway production of Three Sisters. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

In Ira Gershwin's lyric for "But Not for Me," a heartsick postmistress declares that love has brought her "more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee." If I had to guess, I'd say that the lady in question had "Three Sisters" in mind. Few plays are more depressing than Anton Chekhov's soft-spoken study of a turn-of-the-century trio of provincial Russian women who long for the bright lights of Moscow but are forced to settle for ordinary small-town lives that bring them little in the way of joy. What makes their story endurable is the lightness of touch with which Chekhov tells it--which is also what makes it so agonizing to see their remaining hopes dissolve at play's end.

The sisters' tale is, of course, characteristically Russian in its jarringly close juxtaposition of comedy and heartbreak, and that is what poses the biggest difficulty to present-day interpreters: How do you make a play written in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1900 work in America in 2011? In the Classic Stage Company's new Off-Broadway production, Austin Pendleton is taking the same tack that he took two years ago in that company's "Uncle Vanya," which is to toss a group of modern-sounding actors into a traditional-looking setting and see what happens. The results are once again interesting but very uneven, though not so much as to keep Chekhov's great play from making its heart-breaking effect.

Mr. Pendleton's cast is full of familiar faces, some of whom also appeared in his "Uncle Vanya." The sisters are Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessica Hecht, and Juliet Rylance, and of them it is Ms. Rylance who is most memorable. Her warm, throaty alto and utterly sincere demeanor are just right for Irina, the youngest and least disillusioned of the three sisters. Ms. Hecht also gives a strong and believable performance as the careworn Olga. Not so Ms. Gyllenhaal, a talented performer who is as wrongly cast here as she was in "Uncle Vanya," and for much the same reason: Her demeanor and voice are so obviously contemporary as to jolt the eye and ear....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Neither does he spin

Wilfrid Sheed, who was (almost) as good a novelist as he was a critic, died two weeks ago. In his honor, I've devoted my "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal to his best novel, Max Jamison. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

"Never pay any attention to what critics say," Jean Sibelius once told a fellow composer. "Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!" The members of my unhallowed profession have, however, been portrayed in many novels, plays and movies, and most of those portrayals have been pretty nasty. From Addison DeWitt in "All About Eve" to Anton Ego in "Ratatouille," fictional critics tend as a rule to be snide, venal and, above all all, creatively impotent. What's more, you get the definite feeling that they loathe themselves for being unable to do that of which they write. As DeWitt puts it with self-lacerating hauteur, "My native habitat is the theater. In it I toil not, neither do I spin."

I won't say that these portrayals are totally unfair. (In fact, I won't even say they're mostly unfair, but that's another column.) I do, however, want to draw your attention to a very different kind of portrait, one that was, logically enough, written by a very different kind of critic. Wilfrid Sheed, who died the other day, was a greatly talented novelist who ended up being better known as a critic, in which capacity he was also formidably gifted. But if there's any justice in this world, Mr. Sheed will remembered longest for "Max Jamison," the 1970 novel in which he brought off the seemingly impossible feat of making a drama critic look quite a bit like a human being.

The title character of "Max Jamison" is a New York critic with two strings to his bow. He writes about film for a highbrow quarterly and theater for Now, an imaginary weekly newsmagazine that bears a not-so-coincidental resemblance to Time (just as Max himself bears a surface resemblance to John Simon, though Mr. Sheed vehemently denied that Mr. Simon was his model). Max is, in his own words, "a son of a bitch in an imperfect world" who has grown weary of "the dreary business of accreting an opinion." He is also desperately and comprehensively unhappy, having had two marriages blow up under him, and as the book begins, he is teetering on the edge of a full-blown midlife crisis, the kind where you chase after much younger women and hear poisonously snippy voices in the night.

Max is also--and this is the point of the novel--a man of impeccably cultivated taste who is tortured by the increasing tastelessness of the world around him, and who expresses his exasperation in one- and two-liners that go off in nearly every paragraph, leaving gaping holes wherever they explode....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken."

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Posted February 04, 12:00 AM

February 3, 2011

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)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)
• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, 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)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 13, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Freud's Last Session (drama, G, unsuitable for children, reviewed here)

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

February 2, 2011

TT: It's a good day

Right now I'm too blissfully tired to do much more than post the news that last night's premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf (actually, the first forty-five minutes of Satchmo at the Waldorf, but who's counting?) was a howling success. As if that weren't enough to report, my publisher informed me via e-mail this morning that the first three chapters of my Duke Ellington biography, which I sent in a couple of weeks ago, "read like a freight train." Whee!

I'm (A) very, very happy and (B) taking the rest of the day off. See you tomorrow. Or whenever.

UPDATE: A friend writes: "Shouldn't they read like the A train?"

Posted February 02, 11:58 AM

TT: Snapshot

This week's video: Joseph Szigeti plays the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto:

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

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

February 1, 2011

LEON FLEISHER RETURNS—AGAIN

Posted February 01, 3:54 PM

TT: A little taste

Earlier today I posted about the foreword that I'm writing for the University of Chicago Press' upcoming uniform-edition versions of Flashfire and Firebreak, two novels about Parker, the professional criminal, that were written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym of Richard Stark. I sent the finished foreword off to Chicago this morning. Here are the last two paragraphs.

* * *

When I first started reading about Parker, I thought of the words of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov: "If you were to destroy in humanity the belief in its immortality, not only love but every vital force for the continuation of earthly life would at once dry up. Moreover, then nothing would be immoral any more, everything would be permitted, even cannibalism." Up to a point, that applies to Parker, a man to whom nothing but amateurishness is immoral. Even more to the point, though, is Liliana Cavani's 2002 film version of Ripley's Game, in which these words are put into the mouth of Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero: "I lack your conscience and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don't worry about being caught because I don't believe anyone is watching."

Like Ripley, who is a real sociopath, Parker has no conscience. Somehow, though, I doubt that has ever troubled him. I think he got up one morning, decided for reasons known only to himself that no one was watching except for the cops, and decided to act accordingly. Nor do I think there was anything dramatic about his decision, no Farewell remorse...evil be thou my good moment to stun the groundlings. And that's what makes Parker so interesting, so seductive, and so wholly unlike most of the rest of us: he just doesn't care, and never did.

Posted February 01, 1:49 PM

TT: I'll work it in somewhere

In addition to presenting my first play tonight at Rollins College in Florida, I have to write and file two Wall Street Journal columns before flying up to New York on Saturday morning to see a press preview of Pete Gurney's new play. I'm also working on the fourth chapter of Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington, which is about two thousand words away from being done. I just started writing a description of the Cotton Club, the mob-owned Harlem nightspot where Ellington and his band took up residency in 1927, and the kitchen table of our borrowed Florida condo is piled high with all sorts of relevant books.

That is, needless to say, plenty to do, but I also want to knock out yet another piece this week. The University of Chicago Press has asked me to write a preface for Flashfire and Firebreak, two of the upcoming volumes in its uniform edition of the Parker novels. Regular readers of this blog will know what and whom I'm talking about, but for those of you just joining us, Parker is the professional thief about whom Donald E. Westlake published twenty-four novels under the pseudonym of "Richard Stark" between 1962 and his death in 2008. Several of them were turned into films of widely varying quality, the best remembered of which is John Boorman's Point Blank, in which Lee Marvin played Parker.

The books themselves were long known only to the most assiduous of mystery buffs, in part because many of them were originally published as paperback originals, and it took years for them to find a wider following. Today, though, the Parker novels are now regarded as classics of their genre, and the University of Chicago Press is currently in the process of reprinting them all in batches of two or three. Each batch features a preface written by a longtime admirer of Westlake's work, and I've been tapped to supply one for Flashfire and Firebreak.

The piece is due next Tuesday, but I want to try to get it into the can before going to New York. I have a birthday coming up on Sunday and Mrs. T follows suit next Thursday, and we'd really like to kick back and relax, so I started drafting my essay yesterday morning and hope to wrap it up and send it off some time tomorrow.

And why am I telling you all this? Because I'm bragging. My admiration for Westlake is extravagant--it was one of the not-so-minor disappointments of my life that I never got to meet him--and I consider it a great honor to have been asked to write about his Parker novels for the uniform edition. I've only written two such retrospective prefaces in the past, for new editions of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado and Paul Taylor's Private Domain: An Autobiography. I think this assignment ranks right up there, don't you?

Posted February 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

Posted February 01, 12:00 AM