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March 31, 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.

BROADWAY:
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, 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 Apr. 24, 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Driving Miss Daisy (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK 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 SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Ghost-Writer (drama, G, closes Apr. 3, reviewed here)

Posted March 31, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."

Nancy Astor (quoted in Reno Evening Gazette, May 4, 1964)

Posted March 31, 12:00 AM

March 30, 2011

TT: Snapshot

Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, and Carl Reiner perform "From Here to Obscurity," a parody of the film version of From Here to Eternity originally telecast on NBC's Your Show of Shows:

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

Posted March 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."

Albert Einstein (quoted in the Observer, Jan. 15, 1950)

Posted March 30, 12:00 AM

March 29, 2011

TT: So you want to get reviewed

Now that theater companies are starting to announce their 2011-12 seasons, it's time for a newly revised repeat performance of this perennial posting. (I've already finished booking my travel through the end of August, so don't bother getting in touch with me about summer shows.) If you've seen it before and aren't interested, my apologies!

* * *

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I'm the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. Don't take my word for it, though. Ask Howard Sherman of the American Theatre Wing, who blogged as follows earlier this year:

To get a regional show to Broadway, one must find a producer who wants to champion the show and take it on as a major commitment. Unfortunately, producers aren't flying to theatres around the country constantly checking out every possible new play and revival for their next Broadway success. And unless you're in a major city and you have a preponderance of positive reviews by long established critics (whose numbers are in decline), your own entreaties aren't likely to cause anyone to jump on a plane unless you already have a relationship with them.

As for "national press" discovering your work and bringing it to the attention of New York bound producers, your only real option is luring The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout to see your show (and Terry regularly publishes his guidelines for what he's likely to be interested in). While The New York Times ventures out of town on occasion (though most frequently to the Berkshires, Chicago or London, it seems), it's rare even for the country's largest newspaper, USA Today, to see work outside of New York; attention from television and radio is even rarer.

So what if you run a company I haven't visited? How might you lure me to come see you for the first time? Now's the time to start asking that question, because I'm just starting to work on my reviewing calendar for the fall of 2011. Here, then, are the guidelines that I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see, along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Get your 2011-12 schedule to me as soon as possible. That means, if possible, prior to the public announcement. I'll keep it to myself.

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don't review dinner theater, and it's very unusual for me to visit children's theaters. (Sorry, but I have to draw the line somewhere.) I'm somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule, and I'm strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season—and two of them have to be serious. I won't put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The 39 Steps is your idea of a daring new play, I won't go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven't yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as America's drama critic. Right now Alaska and Colorado loom largest, but if you're doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or Montana, I'd be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won't visit an out-of-town company that I've never seen to review a play by an author of whom I've never heard. What I look for is an imaginative mix of revivals of major plays—including comedies—and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I've admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Brooke Berman, Nilo Cruz, Liz Flahive, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, John Guare, Adam Guettel, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Peter Shaffer, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older shows I'd like to review that haven't been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you're doing The Beauty Part, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, The Iceman Cometh, Loot, Man and Superman, No Time for Comedy, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, or just about anything by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, T.S. Eliot, Horton Foote, William Inge, or Terence Rattigan, kindly drop me a line.

Finally, I'm very specifically interested in seeing large-cast plays that no longer get performed in New York for budgetary reasons.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two—especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Good People are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you're not already reading my Journal column, you might want to start.)

In addition, there are shows that I like but have written about more than once in the past few seasons and thus am not likely to seek out again for the next few seasons. Some cases in point: American Buffalo, Arcadia, Awake and Sing!, Biography, Blithe Spirit, Dividing the Estate, Endgame, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Glass Menagerie, Into the Woods, Life of Galileo, The Little Foxes, A Little Night Music, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Our Town, Private Lives, Speed-the-Plow, Twelve Angry Men, Waiting for Godot, West Side Story, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I am, however, going to keep on reviewing What the Butler Saw until somebody gets it right!)

• I group my shots. It isn't cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don't all have to be in the same city.) If you're the publicist of the Lower Slobbovia Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of Guys and Dolls, your best bet is to point out that TheaterSlobbovia also happens to be doing Separate Tables that same weekend. Otherwise, I'll probably go to Chicago instead.

• I don't travel in the spring. Broadway is usually so busy in March and April that I'm not able to go anywhere else to see anything else. If you're going to put on a show that you think might catch my eye, consider doing it between September and February.

• Web sites matter. A lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you're doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I'll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can't spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn't mean I won't consider reviewing you—I know appearances can be deceiving—but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON or NOW PLAYING button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season's productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area. Like many people, I rely on my GPS unit when driving, so it is essential that this page also include the street address of the theater where you perform. Failure to conspicuously display this address is a hanging offense. (I also suggest that you include a list of recommended restaurants and hotels that are close to the theater.)

This is an example of a good company with an attractive, well-organized Web site on which most of the above information is easy to find.

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don't want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the flood of random press releases. As a result, I no longer recommend that anyone write to me there. I get a lot of spam at my "About Last Night" mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal. Any e-mail sent to me at the Journal that contains attachments will be discarded unread.

(Really smart publicists will know how to find out my personal e-mail address, and will use it instead of writing to me here.)

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I've come to see shows solely because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me. Go thou and do likewise.

Posted March 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Why be a man when you can be a success?"

Bertolt Brecht, A Man's a Man (trans. Eric Bentley)

Posted March 29, 12:00 AM

March 28, 2011

TT: How to succeed on Broadway

Finally, a rave: I review How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, rapturously. This piece went up on the paper's Web site a couple of minutes ago, so I've decided to go ahead and publish it here as well. Here's a excerpt.

* * *

The professionals are back. Well into one of the dimmest Broadway seasons in recent memory, Rob Ashford has lit the lights with a smart and satisfying production of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," the Frank Loesser-Abe Burrows musical that taught a generation of viperine office politicians how to stick a shiv into their bosses without leaving any fingerprints on the handle. Needless to say, it's Daniel Radcliffe, better known as Harry Potter, who's filling the seats, but it's Mr. Ashford who deserves most of the credit for the artistic success of this hard-charging, high-flying revival of a show whose gleaming craftsmanship is as self-evident today as when it opened on Broadway a half-century ago.

Surely little need be said about the oft-celebrated virtues of "How to Succeed." For openers, it features a perfect score by Loesser in which every song pushes the action along briskly. Burrows, who also collaborated with Loesser on "Guys and Dolls," another entry on the short list of all-time great musicals, was primarily responsible for the book, which is put together with immaculate skill. And that brings us back to Mr. Ashford, who with "How to Succeed" establishes himself as one of the best comic choreographers on Broadway today. Not only are his dances full of perfectly realized visual punchlines, but they have an exhilarating momentum that serves the show without overwhelming the plot. Each number builds on its predecessor until you want to stand up and yell with delight--which, at show's end, is what you'll do....

Of course you'll be wanting to know all about Mr. Radcliffe, and the answer is that he's a pretty good singer and an unexpectedly good dancer. His small voice is plaintive, well-tuned and rather sweet, which puts a fresh spin on the familiar character of J. Pierrepont Finch, who ascends from the mailroom to the boardroom with vertiginous speed. Mr. Radcliffe's Finch is a twinkly, huggable gent whose ruthless unscrupulosity is positively endearing.

The only problem with this approach is that Mr. Radcliffe doesn't have the vocal firepower needed to put his big number, "I Believe in You," all the way across the footlights, which causes the second act to sag briefly in the middle. But not to worry, for Mr. Ashford's staging of "Brotherhood of Man" is so propulsive that the energy level soars again, and Mr. Radcliffe is on top (literally) of every step. No, he's not Robert Morse, who created the role on Broadway, then filmed it in 1967. But who is--and so what?...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Robert Morse sings "I Believe in You" in the 1967 film version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying:

Posted March 28, 5:05 PM

TT: Thanks a million

I nearly deleted this piece of blogmail because the subject header looked like spam. Something made me hesitate and open it up, and this is what it said:

I am the recipient of many undeserved blessings. You are one of them. I only met you once in person at the book signing [for Pops] in New Orleans. Yet I meet you every day on your blog. Thanks.

To you as well, sir--and to everyone else who reads "About Last Night." Your collective presence is a daily pleasure.

Posted March 28, 1:43 PM

TT: New leaf

I walk up these one hundred and twenty-eight steps nearly every day when I'm in Manhattan. They are the climax of my daily walk, which takes me past Bennett Park, the highest natural point on the island of Manhattan, down to the bustling Dominican enclave that surrounds 181st Street, over to a side street called Overlook Terrace, and up the long, long staircase that leads to Hudson Heights, my new neighborhood. I usually spend a half-hour on this hilly circuit, a pretty fair chunk of walking for a middle-aged man who, left to his own devices, would probably get next to no exercise at all.

Why do I do it? Because Mrs. T and my doctor want me to, and because I share their feeling that the world is a better place with me in it. Would that physical exercise came more naturally to me, but it never has, partly because I'm clumsy (a typical by-product of lifelong left-handedness) and partly because I was always the sort of kid who preferred reading or practicing piano to playing in the street. As a result, I weigh too much and have hypertension, for which I take an assortment of pills twice a day and strive to eat more austerely. Nearly dying five years ago fired my resolve to take care of myself, and getting married sealed the deal...or so I thought. But the summer and fall of 2009 were so hectic, what with the premiere of The Letter and the publication of Pops, that I fell off the wagon of self-maintenance, and by last fall I was out of shape and feeling the consequences.

The good news is that moving to Hudson Heights, perhaps not surprisingly, has inspired me to straighten up and fly right again. No, I don't like it, and somehow I doubt I ever will. But I do like exploring my new neighborhood very much, and I also like the thought of living longer. I have books and operas and plays to write, and I also have a wife who, for reasons of her own, enjoys my company and would prefer not to be deprived of it unexpectedly.

So now I'm eating smarter, getting smaller, and trudging up that 128-step staircase once a day, and maybe one day I'll learn to like it. Probably not, though.

UPDATE: I got a clean bill of health from the doctor this morning. Then I trudged back up the hill again....

Posted March 28, 12:00 AM

TT: The Letter is back

Paul Moravec and I aren't so busy prepping for the world premiere of Danse Russe that we've forgotten about our first opera. The New School is putting on an arts festival called Noir, and The Letter is very much a part of it.

Quoth the press release:

The theme of our first arts festival is Noir, a cinematic style of shadowy expressiveness that had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Coined by a French critic in 1946, the term film noir refers to movies depicting a morally ambiguous world of cynical private eyes, lonely gangsters, and femme fatales. Since then, the influence of noir has been felt in areas ranging from fashion design to fine art, graphic art to fiction, suggesting the alienation and disorientation of modernism through stark silhouettes, sexual frankness, stylized emotion, and the absence of sentimentality. Join The New School community in an exploration of noir in a festival of iconic films, hard-boiled storytelling, graphic art, and illustration inspired by this uniquely 20th century style.

That's right up our alley, The Letter being what Paul has called an "opera noir," and so we're taking part in the festival, which will also feature appearances and presentations by such interesting folk as Mary Gaitskill, Molly Haskell, Todd Haynes, Ben Katchor, Greil Marcus, Frances McDormand, and Luc Sante.

For our part, Paul and I will be presenting and discussing excerpts--both live and on video--from The Letter at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 7. Our joint appearance will take place in the New School's Arnhold Hall, which is at 55 W. 13th St. in Manhattan.

Admission to this and other festival events is free, but seating is limited and you must make an advance reservation to get in. To do so, or for more information about the festival, go here.

Posted March 28, 12:00 AM

TT: At it again

In case you haven't noticed, there's new stuff in the right-hand column. Take a gander when you get a chance.

Posted March 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist, and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."

John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces

Posted March 28, 12:00 AM

March 26, 2011

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD CRITIC

Posted March 26, 9:37 AM

March 25, 2011

DVD

Posted March 25, 5:30 PM

BOOK

Posted March 25, 5:30 PM

TT: Everybody but Mohammed

I review The Book of Mormon and Ghetto Klown in today's Wall Street Journal. Neither show passed muster with me. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the naughty boys of "South Park," have teamed up with Robert Lopez, one of the co-creators of "Avenue Q," and the results of their collaboration are pretty much what you'd expect: slick and smutty. "The Book of Mormon" is the first musical to open on Broadway since "La Cage aux Folles" that has the smell of a send-in-the-tourists hit. Casey Nicholaw ("The Drowsy Chaperone") has staged the musical numbers with cheery energy and the cast, especially Nikki M. James, is terrific. But don't let anybody try to tell you that "The Book of Mormon" is suitable for anyone other than 12-year-old boys who have yet to graduate from fart jokes to "Glee." A couple of reasonably effective production numbers notwithstanding, it's flabby, amateurish and very, very safe.

The plot is exiguous. Two shiny-faced young Mormons (Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells) are sent to Uganda to evangelize the natives, promptly discover that life in Africa is more complicated than they thought, and prevail by being geeky and lucky. This is, in other words, a one-joke show, the joke being that Mormons are unworldly nerds who think that "bullpoop" is a deletable expletive. Most of the other jokes in the show are derivative of this one and are just as obvious, including the Obligatory Song About a Closeted Gay Mormon: "Being gay is bad, but lying is worse/So just realize you've got a curable curse!" This being a "South Park" spinoff, we also get several other songs which operate on the mistaken assumption that four-letter words are automatically funny when sung, plus an assortment of AIDS-in-Africa "jokes" that are to black comedy what pies in the face are to screwball comedy.

The creators of "South Park" like to call themselves "equal-opportunity offenders," but if you think there's anything risky about "The Book of Mormon," you're kidding yourself. Making fun of Mormons in front of a Broadway crowd is like shooting trout in a demitasse cup....

John Leguizamo has turned to straight autobiography in "Ghetto Klown," his fifth one-man show. No, his parents didn't understand him. Yes, he became an actor and started getting work in Hollywood, albeit in stereotypical wisecracking-Latino-with-an-Uzi roles. Yes, he started writing one-man stage shows in order to understand himself. Yes, his screen career went into the tank, in part because of his undisciplined behavior and general mouthiness. No, his first marriage didn't work out. Yes, his second marriage did, which gave him the courage to write "Ghetto Klown" and return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus...but enough already! Mr. Leguizamo is an energetic and resourceful performer and "Ghetto Klown" has its moments. The problem is that you've heard them all before...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order."

Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

Posted March 25, 12:00 AM

March 24, 2011

TT: Counting down

Danse Russe, my latest operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, opens in Philadelphia on April 28. It's a backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring (we call it a "vaudeville") whose four characters are Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Pierre Monteux. If you've ever wondered how the greatest composer of the twentieth century might have done the old soft shoe, this is your chance to find out.

Commissioned by Philadelphia's Center City Opera Theater, Danse Russe is part of a triple bill called "Rites, Rhythm...Riot!" that also includes the local premieres of Renard, a one-act opera by Stravinsky, and Ragtime, a newly choreographed version of Stravinsky's 1918 homage to American popular music that will be performed by Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers.

You'll only get three chances to see Danse Russe, twice in Philly and once in Camden, New Jersey, so you'd better make plans now if you don't want to be left out in the cold. To buy tickets or find out more about the production, go here.

Posted March 24, 11:24 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.

BROADWAY:
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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 Apr. 24, 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)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Driving Miss Daisy (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON 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 WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Ghost-Writer (drama, G, closes Apr. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted March 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Life in the old boy yet

I recently made a new friend, an occurrence that is unfailingly gratifying for the middle-aged, since the constant friction of life has an unfortunate way of robbing us of the old ones. People are forever dying or moving away or getting married, having children, and withdrawing into the increasingly private sphere of family life, and if you don't continually replenish your reserve of friends, you're likely to look up one day and find that you haven't any.

In addition, it's useful for all sorts of reciprocal reasons when those no longer young befriend those who still are. My quick-witted young friend (whom I first met, amazingly enough, on Twitter) happens to be exactly half my age, thus providing me with a window into the ever-mysterious world of Things as They Are Right Now, while I in turn give her case-hardened counsel on the ins and outs of the writer's life.

We sealed our friendship yesterday over lunch at a downtown restaurant to which I hadn't gone for years and years. "This is very nostalgic for me," I told her. "I had my first editorial lunch in Manhattan at this place, back when I worked at Harper's. It would have been in...oh, 1985. That was when you were in kindergarten."

"That was when I was in diapers," she retorted instantly, which turned out to be all the more embarrassing because it was true.

Speaking of embarrassment, my friend and I decided that one of the most effective ways to cement a friendship is by swapping embarrassing confidences, which we proceeded to do while waiting for the check to arrive. (I think we came out roughly even.) After I returned home, we exchanged the following messages via Twitter:

SHE The most positive relationships in my life are built on foundations of voluntarily disclosed humiliation.

ME It's like exchanging hostages.

SHE Aaaaaaaaaaaand I just laughed out loud at my desk like a little nimrod. Terry, for the win.

I felt positively sprightly, as though I'd done a figure-eight in my wheelchair.

Posted March 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"What nature does generally, is sure to be more or less beautiful; what she does rarely, will either be very beautiful, or absolutely ugly."

John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting

Posted March 24, 12:00 AM

March 23, 2011

TT: Snapshot

An excerpt from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Michael Elliott and starring Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, and John Gielgud, originally broadcast on the BBC in 1962:

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

Posted March 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The more we study art, the less we care for nature."

Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"

Posted March 23, 12:00 AM

March 22, 2011

TT: Choking on sequins

I hated every second of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which I reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

If your idea of a good show is one in which the chorus boys are dressed up to look like cupcakes, confetti is dropped at 8:34 and "I Will Survive" is sung twice, read no further. "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" (no comma, please) is the musical for you. If, on the other hand, you have an old-fashioned yen for shows in which touching things happen to believable people and the songs have something to do with the plot, stay as far away as possible from the Palace Theatre. (Wyoming might be far enough.) Not only is "Priscilla" a sequin-encrusted dragfest without a heart, but it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in the recent history of Broadway, a pointless musical version of a sweet little movie out of which something smart--and, yes, touching--might easily have been made. Instead we get human cupcakes.

Let's go back to the movie for a moment. Released in 1994, "The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert" told of how three drag queens, one of them an aging transsexual played, amazingly enough, by Terence Stamp, traveled across the Australian desert in a rundown motor home, looking for love in all the wrong places. Despite a few overly obvious moments, it was a modest and poignant film not unworthy of "La Cage aux Folles," by which it was clearly inspired, and has since become something of a cult classic.

Turning "Priscilla" into a stage musical is so good an idea that one wonders why it took so long. But in doing so, Stephan Elliott (who wrote and directed the movie) and Allan Scott, who collaborated on the book, have leached out every bit of sentiment from the film, replacing it with brass-plated showbiz pseudo-feeling....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might also be said that nature is usually wrong."

James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

Posted March 22, 12:00 AM

March 21, 2011

TT: In one fell swoop

I had planned to take the weekend off and putter, but on Thursday I started writing a new play called Brother Al, and by Friday night the words were pouring out of me so fast that I decided to put aside everything else and see what happened. Well, what ended up happening was that I finished writing the first draft of the three-character play on Sunday afternoon, all two acts and fourteen thousand words of it. I spent the rest of the day feeling astonished, as though I'd been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale, and by the time I went to bed, a theater-savvy friend had read the script and told me that she thought it worked.

Plays, unlike novels, do get written that fast--sometimes. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of Private Lives in four days, though he spent a week and a half sketching out the plot before sitting down to write the dialogue. I'm not Noël Coward, needless to say, but it took me about that long to write the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last winter, and I was so surprised by the quickness with which it took shape that quite some time went by before I could be persuaded that it might possibly be anything other than lousy. "Don't worry," a very experienced playwright told me a few weeks later. "With a play, that kind of speed can be a good sign, proof of inspiration."

It's way too soon for me to do anything but spend the next few days sitting on the new play, after which I'll read the first draft again and see what I think of it. I need to cool down before drawing any conclusions, and I've got more than enough to do this week and next to keep me well and truly distracted. But the mere fact that I was able to do such a thing at the age of fifty-five is in and of itself profoundly gratifying.

Not until I started work on The Letter did I imagine myself capable of producing anything more creative than a well-written biography. Today I have two opera libretti under my belt, plus a one-man play about Louis Armstrong that has survived the grueling test of two readings, one private and one public, and is looking stageworthy, not just to me but also to several case-hardened professionals. Now I've written a second play. Go figure, and let me know what you decide.

As for me, I'm not quite sure who I am this morning, but whoever this guy is, I think I like him.

Posted March 21, 7:51 AM

TT: A Saturday afternoon walk in Fort Tryon Park

I love my new neighborhood:

Posted March 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I nauseate walking; 'tis a country diversion; I loathe the country."

William Congreve, The Way of the World

Posted March 21, 12:00 AM

March 18, 2011

TT: When good enough isn't

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of David Leveaux's London revival of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I wanted it to be a lot better than it was. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Enough about "Spider-Man" already--Tom Stoppard is back on Broadway! Only time will tell whether "Arcadia" is Mr. Stoppard's masterpiece, but I don't think it's premature to call it one of the key English-language plays of the postwar era, and even in a staging that is less than satisfactory, it makes a rich and affecting impression. Now for the bad news: David Leveaux's revival of "Arcadia," which was originally mounted in London two years ago with a different cast, isn't much better than adequate. When you're talking about a high-profile revival of a great play, good enough won't cut it.

More about that shortly, but first a few heartfelt words about "Arcadia" itself. Last seen on Broadway in 1995, it is an entrancingly clever whodunit for eggheads whose underlying purpose is to dramatize the central problem of modernity: How are we to live our lives if it turns out that they have no ultimate meaning? The play, which is set in an English country house, moves back and forth in time between 1809 and today, and the two main modern-day characters, Hannah (Lia Williams) and Bernard (Billy Crudup), are scholars who are trying to figure out what was going on in the house two centuries earlier. The answer is both astonishing and improbable: Thomasina (Bel Powley), a 13-year-old child prodigy, has figured out the Second Law of Thermodynamics all by herself, much to the bewilderment of Septimus (Tom Riley), her rakish tutor, to whom she is no less precociously attracted.

The reason why this matters is twofold. Not only does it mean that the universe is slowly and inexorably running down, but it casts a dark shadow of doubt on the optimistic certitude with which Septimus and his contemporaries (not to mention most of us today) lead their well-ordered lives....

"Arcadia," like "The Coast of Utopia," is--or should be--far easier to experience than it is to explain. Mr. Stoppard has embedded his philosophical interests in an ingeniously structured double-decker plot that is studded with glints of wicked wit ("Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I mean, not in that order"). You don't have to be a physicist, much less a philosopher, to see what Mr. Stoppard is up to, so long as "Arcadia" is staged and the lines spoken with complete clarity and correct emphasis.

This, alas, is where Mr. Leveaux and his cast go wrong. Time and again Mr. Stoppard's punch lines go astray or get thrown away, and the trouble starts as soon as the curtain goes up...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Tom Stoppard talks about playwrighting with Charlie Rose:

Posted March 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Your friendly neighborhood critic

As fine-arts institutions grapple with the growing problem of declining mainstream media interest in their activities, they're looking to the Web for solutions. Hence my "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal, a report on the Cleveland Orchestra's new attempt to take up the slack. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

The Cleveland Orchestra helped get one critic fired. Now it's hired another one. In February Enrique Fernández reported for duty as "critic-in-residence" in Miami, where the orchestra has been playing an annual residency since 2007. Mr. Fernández is not, however, your run-of-the-mill music critic. For one thing, he doesn't write reviews; for another, his pieces don't appear in a newspaper or magazine. Instead he writes a blog on the Cleveland Orchestra's Miami-based website. His job is to get Floridans talking about the orchestra--and posting their own opinions of its concerts.

The ironies surrounding Mr. Fernández' appointment are manifold. In 2008 Don Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's classical music critic, was reassigned to another beat for having written predominantly negative reviews of Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra's music director--reviews about which the orchestra's management had previously complained to the paper's editors. Mr. Rosenberg responded by suing the paper for defamation and age discrimination. He lost, but the resulting stink has yet to dissipate.

Is the Cleveland Orchestra having second thoughts? I doubt it. Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on "blog," is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra's performances: "Online everybody's a critic....Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it's your ticket, rave on, pan on."

Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the "online communities" that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums...

Mr. Fernández's title points to the great flaw of institutional blogging, which is that it is institutional. Whatever else he does with "his" blog, you can bet he won't be saying anything on it that's even mildly critical of the Cleveland Orchestra....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In a flash, Emmerich had made a startling discovery. When humiliation reached a certain point, death was preferable. He had heard the fact stated many times, in and out of course, sometimes seriously, sometmes ironically. It had always struck him as a preposterous assumption--belonging to another age. But it was true."

W.R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle

Posted March 18, 12:00 AM

March 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.

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 Apr. 24, 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)
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, 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 SOON IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• Ghost-Writer (drama, G, closes Apr. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream and Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, playing in rotating repertory, reviewed here)

Posted March 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

The Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Paul Desmond, Joe Morello, and Eugene Wright, plays "St. Louis Blues" in 1961:

Posted March 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"But as a rule men were not critical of themselves, only of others."

W.R. Burnett, Vanity Row

Posted March 17, 12:00 AM

March 16, 2011

TT: Snapshot

A rare kinescope of Bing Crosby and Johnny Mercer singing a medley of "Mister Meadowlark," "On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen," and Mercer's updated version of "Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean":

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

Posted March 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The music stopped and one of the fellows put in another nickel. A new record swung up off the turntable and a mellow baritone voice filled the little room.

"'Crosby,' said Marie. 'He's sure swell.'

"'He sure is,' agreed Roy. 'He's about the only singer I like. I hate singers. They ought to have on skirts. But not that guy. He's got a real voice and I hear he's right all the way.'"

W.R. Burnett, High Sierra

Posted March 16, 12:00 AM

March 15, 2011

TT: What's in a name

Nobody ever really liked "Black Beauty," the working title of my Duke Ellington biography, so I spent a day last week trying to think of a better alternative. Actually, it took about five minutes for the light to come on, after which I said to myself, "Duh, I know--why not call it Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington?"

As a rule I don't care for obvious titles, but sometimes the obvious solution to a problem is also the best one, and no sooner did this one come to me than I got the strong feeling that I was finally on the right track. I ran Mood Indigo past my publisher and Mrs. T, both of whom gave it a very enthusiastic thumbs-up. The next day I posted the new title on Twitter and Facebook and got unanimously favorable responses. So until and unless a decisively superior idea occurs to me, Mood Indigo it is.

Now all I have to do is finish the damn book!

Posted March 15, 12:00 AM

TT: One never knows, do one?

Courtesy of YouTube, here is the Norman Petty Trio's 1954 recording of "Mood Indigo." (Yes, that Norman Petty.) My father owned a copy of the original single, and I played it constantly when I was a little boy. It was the first song by Duke Ellington that I ever heard. Who knew?

Posted March 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Violence is a form of stupidity."

W.R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle

Posted March 15, 12:00 AM

March 14, 2011

TT: Somewhere or other

On Friday night I returned to Manhattan, where the trees are bare, the air is crisp, and I take cabs instead of driving my own (rented) car. I've been elsewhere--mostly in Florida--for much of the past three months, and I hit the road mere days after moving to a new apartment in a new neighborhood. Because of all this, the sense of strangeness that I always feel on returning to New York has been heightened even further. You'd almost think I was still on the wing: I haven't had time to hang any of the pieces in the Teachout Museum, and unopened cardboard boxes are piled high in every room.

Fortunately, all of our books and compact discs are shelved, which makes the place feel somewhat more like home. But it isn't, not yet, and it won't be for some time to come, not until we open a few more boxes and buy quite a bit more furniture (we moved from a tiny one-bedroom pied-à-terre to a much larger two-bedroom apartment).

It doesn't help that Mrs. T is in Los Angeles, visiting friends and family and waiting for the last traces of winter to vanish before coming back to New York, which has been far too cold for her of late. I'm more of a winter person, but I, too, have lost my taste for gray skies and dirty snow, and I found it downright painful to lock the door of our borrowed Florida condo for the last time and head for the airport.

What did help--after a fashion--was that the trip that followed was perfectly frightful. It took nine hours from portal to portal, and I spent four of them sitting in an Orlando departure lounge, growing grumpier by the minute. By the time I finally got home, I was so relieved to be there that I was more than willing to overlook the fact that I'd left the warmth of central Florida far behind me. Come Saturday there was plenty of sunshine to distract me, and by Sunday I was starting to feel as though I might possibly be able to put up with Manhattan again.

That remains to be seen...or, rather, it doesn't. I really do live here, after all, and I'll be back on the aisle come Tuesday night, seeing Arcadia on Broadway with a new friend. For better or worse, I've returned to what is, at least for the moment, my natural element. Above all, I won't be catching any more planes until the end of April, for which I'm profoundly, even abjectly grateful. "Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed," Dr. Johnson assured us in Rasselas. That stoic sentence occurred to me more than once as I made my slow, bumpy, crowded, thoroughly disagreeable way north to Manhattan, the place where I work and live and where I've spent the past quarter-century doing my best to feel at home.

Posted March 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

John Scofield and Medeski, Martin, & Wood play "A Go Go" live in 2007:

Posted March 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Rico had no ear for music; he couldn't even whistle, or distinguish one tune from another. But he liked rhythm. There was something straightforward and primitive about jazz rhythms that impressed him."

W.R. Burnett, Little Caesar

Posted March 14, 12:00 AM

March 12, 2011

CD

Posted March 12, 5:22 PM

DVD

Posted March 12, 5:16 PM

CD

Posted March 12, 5:11 PM

DVD

Posted March 12, 12:00 AM

PLAY

Posted March 12, 12:00 AM

March 11, 2011

TT: If you're in need of good cheer today...

...this will do the job:

Posted March 11, 12:19 PM

TT: Tremors

I know all about natural disasters—up to a point. The New Madrid fault runs through the small Missouri town where I grew up, and I spent many a nervous evening in the basement of our house when I was a boy, listening to tornado warnings on a transistor radio. Still, it's been my good fortune never to be physically present when the sky fell or the earth shook.

Perhaps for this reason, I always feel a special kinship with those whose luck has run out. I was, for instance, transfixed by Hurricane Katrina, so much so that Our Girl and I temporarily turned this blog into a clearinghouse of links to Web-wide blog-based reports about the hurricane and its aftermath. Our improvised "stormblog" was one of the first such ventures to be undertaken in the youthful days of blogging, and it astonished us to be told after the fact that we'd written ourselves into the history of a new medium.

Now that the Web has grown up, of course, such homespun efforts have become quaint. Like the rest of the world, I'm using Twitter to keep up with breaking news from Japan, Hawaii, and the West Coast. But as I read the latest reports of the growing devastation, I thought of the only earthquake I've ever experienced. It took place early on a summer morning some twenty years ago, back when I was living in a hilltop apartment in Bronxville, a suburb not far north of New York City. I didn't have an air conditioner, so the windows were flung wide to the breeze. I was awakened by a slight jerk and a strange noise that I suppose in retrospect must have been the creaking of the building's skeleton. It was over in a moment. I jumped out of bed, looked around, and heard a second, even stranger noise: the leaves on the trees that surrounded the building were all fluttering at once. I still remember with the utmost vividness the thought that flashed through my mind: It's a car bomb.

It says something ugly and revealing about the world in which we live today that a man born a stone's throw from the New Madrid fault should have jumped reflexively to such a conclusion about a tremor in the earth. And it makes me wonder whether there might possibly be some utility in being reminded from time to time that nature needs no help from humankind to wreak havoc in the blinking of an eye.

Things are in the saddle,/And run mankind, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously claimed, but that which runs things also runs us, and eventually it runs us into the ground. "Sooner or later you're either going to be a caregiver or a caregetter," a friend of mine told me last night over a glass of wine. That is a sobering thought, reassuring only in the unforgiving way that hard truths give cold consolation. But there is comfort in it nonetheless, just as there is comfort—if only of a bleak and chilly sort—in the undeniable fact that while bombs are made by fools like us, only Mother Nature can make an earthquake. May it always be so.

UPDATE: It now seems that humankind has found a way to heighten the havoc of an earthquake. No matter how strong your sense of irony may be, life will usually find a way to top it.

* * *

A Seventies TV commercial for Chiffon margarine:

Posted March 11, 10:58 AM

TT: Her master's voice

In today's Wall Street Journal I review Florida Stage's regional premiere production of Michael Hollinger's Ghost-Writer. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Theodora Bosanquet is one of those fascinatingly unimportant people privileged by chance to play a choice walk-on part in the history of literature. In 1896 Henry James developed a case of writer's cramp so severe that he was forced to start dictating his novels to a typist, a practice that he continued to the end of his life. Bosanquet, the last of James' secretaries, was a brisk, bright young woman with literary ambitions of her own (she became a critic) who published an illuminating memoir called "Henry James at Work" in which she told what it was like to take dictation from a great writer. While there was no question of her being romantically attracted to James--she appears to have preferred women--Bosanquet was clearly obsessed with him, so much so that she later claimed that he continued to dictate to her after he died.

So curious a creature could scarcely help but attract the posthumous attention of other writers of fiction, among them David Lodge and Cynthia Ozick. Now Michael Hollinger has joined their ranks, using Bosanquet's obsession with James as the inspiration for a three-character play called "Ghost-Writer" that was first performed by Philadelphia's Arden Theatre Company in September and has just received its regional premiere in West Palm Beach....

"Ghost-Writer" is set in Manhattan in 1919, and Bosanquet's fictional counterpart is Myra Babbage (Kate Eastwood Norris), a typist who takes dictation from Franklin Woolsey (J. Fred Shiffman), a haughty, unhappily married novelist with a deeply buried romantic streak. Though the high-strung Myra has a beau of her own, she is a young woman of sensibility and so, not at all surprisingly, falls head over heels in love with Woolsey. The play begins shortly after his death, and we learn at the outset that Myra is fending off reporters. Why? Because it seems that Woolsey left behind the manuscript of an unfinished novel--and that Myra is finishing it, allegedly taking dictation from her deceased employer....

Those who are familiar with Henry James' ghost stories will see at once that this is a quintessentially Jamesian situation, so much so that one wonders why it never occurred to him to write about it. It is no insult to Mr. Hollinger to say that his handling of the situation is more conventional than anything that James would have been likely to write. (The denouement of "Ghost-Writer" is, in fact, reminiscent of Somerset Maugham, a no-nonsense writer who had no use for James' involuted ambiguities.) Still, that doesn't keep him from spinning an absorbing tale, or from putting words into Myra's mouth that are occasionally worthy of the master himself...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publicly criticized by illiterates."

Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat

Posted March 11, 12:00 AM

March 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 Apr. 24, 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)
• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, 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 SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream and Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, playing in rotating repertory through Mar. 19-20, reviewed here)

Posted March 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"She was able to tap into the reserve of anger that fuels every comedian, high or low."

Stephen Sondheim (on Ethel Merman), Finishing the Hat

Posted March 10, 12:00 AM

March 9, 2011

TT: Snapshot

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two perform "I Walk the Line" on The Tex Ritter Show in 1955:

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

Posted March 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I love wordplay, but when there's nothing behind it, when its function is to prolong a tiny idea, it becomes masturbatory."

Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat

Posted March 09, 12:00 AM

March 8, 2011

TT: The way we were (and weren't)

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the first Broadway revival of Jason Miller's That Championship Season, which is awful (the play, that is, not the production). Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Good or bad, every work of art is a time capsule, and sometimes it's the worst ones that contain the most information about what the world was like when they were new. In the '70s American playgoers rushed to embrace Jason Miller's "That Championship Season" as a masterpiece of hard-hitting truth-telling. It ran for 944 performances, won a Pulitzer and was turned into a movie that starred Robert Mitchum. Today "That Championship Season," which is now being revived on Broadway for the first time, looks like what it is, a quasi-political cartoon whose smugness stinks like dime-store perfume. Even so, I doubt that any other play that opened on Broadway in 1972 has more to tell us about the self-satisfied attitudes of the generation that made it a hit.

Miller, an actor-turned-playwright who is remembered (if at all) for having played the priest in "The Exorcist," apparently wrote "That Championship Season" to exorcise what he regarded as the collective sins of those Americans who, like him, grew up in the benighted Age of Eisenhower. The play's five characters are residents of a city indistinguishable from Scranton, the medium-sized Pennsylvania town where Mr. Miller grew up. In youth four of them played together on a high-school basketball team whose coach (Brian Cox) is hosting a reunion dinner at his home. The men seem friendly, but appearances are deceiving, for Phil (Chris Noth) has had an affair with the wife of George (Jim Gaffigan), the mayor of the town where the play is set, and is secretly planning to throw his financial support behind another candidate in the next election....

I won't say that a better playwright might not have been able to make something watchable out of this clichéd scenario, but what Mr. Miller made out of it in 1972 was pretty much what you'd have expected from a second-rate writer born in 1939 who had drunk deep from the well of the '60s and now proposed to inform his audiences that their parents' values were comprehensively corrupt. Hence the coach, a boorish, ill-educated stage-Irish blowhard who proudly displays pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Fightin' Joe McCarthy on his mantelpiece and salts his small talk with good old-fashioned ethnic slurs of the highest possible voltage, thereby alerting the audience to his lack of enlightenment....

Were there really people like the coach? Certainly, and plenty of them, too--but the ludicrous lack of subtlety with which Miller portrays this one kills "That Championship Season" stone dead. Every five pages or so, the action, such as it is, comes to a halt so that he can deliver a sermonette crammed full of his personal prejudices...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Poets tend to be poor lyricists because their verse has its own inner music and doesn't make allowance for the real thing."

Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat

Posted March 08, 12:00 AM

March 7, 2011

TT: Countdown

My latest stint as a visiting scholar at Rollins College's Winter Park Institute ends on Friday, after which I return to New York and resume my regular life. Not surprisingly, my schedule in Florida has grown more and more hectic in recent days, so much so that simply to write about it makes my head sizzle.

Among other things, I drove down to Palm Beach twice. On my first visit, I (A) took part in the world premiere of Steven Caras: See Them Dance and (B) spoke about and signed copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at a breakfast that got written up in the local paper. A week later I went back to cover the opening of the regional premiere of Michael Hollinger's Ghost-Writer. In between these two visits, I flew up to New York to see two Broadway shows and present a literary award on behalf of Barnes & Noble.

Here's part of the official account of the latter occasion:

Barnes & Noble Inc., the world's largest bookseller, today announced that Canadian Kim Echlin's nostalgic novel of a cross-cultural love story, The Disappeared (Black Cat), and attorney David R. Dow's spellbinding account of his efforts to defend the seemingly indefensible, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve), have been named the winners of the 2010 Discover Awards for fiction and non-fiction, respectively. Each writer was awarded a cash prize of $10,000, and a full year of marketing and merchandising support from the bookseller....

The non-fiction winner, The Autobiography of an Execution, is David R. Dow's thrilling account of his efforts to give death row inmates a proper defense in a criminal justice system gone awry. Non-fiction jurist Terry Teachout said, "No matter how you feel about capital punishment--and especially if you support it, whether staunchly or uneasily--this book will bring you face to face with the arbitrary, often capricious way in which the death penalty really works. It's the most sobering book that I read in 2010."

Writers on the non-fiction jury panel included Eric Blehm, whose book, The Last Season, won the Discover Award in 2006; British journalist Christina Lamb, whose book, The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan, was a finalist for the Discover Award in 2002; and critic Terry Teachout, whose biographies include The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken and Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

The Discover Awards honor the works of exceptionally talented writers featured in the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" program during the previous calendar year. In 2010, the Discover Great New Writers program featured the work of 60 previously unknown fiction and non-fiction writers....

I gave the prize to Dow at a luncheon ceremony on Wednesday and said a few heartfelt words about his book, which I once again commend to your attention.

From there I flew back down to Winter Park to attend a salon at which David Behrman, Diana Cooper, and Victoria Redel, the three master artists currently in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, discussed their work with a group of local supporters of the center, which is the best-run and most handsomely designed artists' colony imaginable. I paid a brief visit there last month, which had the effect of making me want to go back as soon as possible. (Small-world story: Behrman turns out to be the son of S.N. Behrman, the playwright whose work is a cause of mine. He was as surprised to learn that I knew who his father was as I was to learn that he was Sam Behrman's son.)

Next came my second trip to Palm Beach, after which I returned to Winter Park to write a review of one of the shows I'd seen on Broadway (it'll be in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal) and hear a performance of Bach's St. John Passion given by the Bach Festival Society that was conducted by my old friend John Sinclair. Having just spent a week hurtling from place to place, it was a comfort to sit in Rollins College's Knowles Memorial Chapel, one of the most tranquil spaces that I know, and listen to profoundly spiritual music that says what it has to say without wasting a note.

Now my work in Florida is done, and all that remains for Mrs. T and me to do is pack our bags and say goodbye to our new friends. Have we missed New York? Sure. In fact, we've been on the move so steadily since mid-December that we haven't even had time to buy furniture for our new Manhattan apartment, much less to hang any of the pieces in the Teachout Museum. I long to explore our new neighborhood, and I want very much to see all my old friends in New York.

That said, I also know that come Friday night, I'll be missing Winter Park, too. Aside from the straightforward and uncomplicated affection that I feel for the place and its people, I'm astonished by the amount of work that I've been able to get done on Danse Russe, Satchmo at the Waldorf, and my Duke Ellington biography since I arrived here in January. New York, they say, is the most stimulating of cities, but I find there's at least as much to be said for the beneficial effects of setting up shop in a smaller, quieter place where the pace is slower and the overall frenzy level significantly lower (though not in the past couple of weeks!).

In 1991 I wrote a book in which I asked the following question: "When do we acquire the grace to feel at home where we are?" Home, needless to say, is wherever Mrs. T is, but otherwise...well, I'm still working on that one twenty years later.

Posted March 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

An extremely rare kinescope of film noir actress Lizabeth Scott singing "He Is a Man" on TV in 1958:

Posted March 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation."

Richard Wilbur, interview, The Paris Review, Winter 1977

Posted March 07, 12:00 AM

March 4, 2011

TT: Imitation of life

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the premiere of David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, which I didn't like at all. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

"Good People" is, or purports to be, a study of life in Southie, a down-at-heel Boston neighborhood beloved of movie stars who think they can do the local accent. Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, who comes from a real-life Southie family, managed to land a scholarship to a tony New England prep school, which was his escalator to fame and fortune. All this undoubtedly explains the plot of "Good People," in which Margie (Frances McDormand, who works the charm pedal a bit too enthusiastically) is fired from her job as a clerk at a local dollar store, thus making it impossible for her to support her adult daughter, who was born prematurely and is severely handicapped (and who is kept offstage throughout the play, presumably so as not to shock the matinée crowd). In desperation, Margie looks up Mikey (Tate Donovan), an old high-school boyfriend who studied hard, became a doctor and now lives in a big house in a fancy suburb with his cute young wife (Renée Elise Goldsberry), who is--wait for it--an upper-middle-class black.

In the first scene, we see Margie being canned for chronic lateness. Needless to say, it's not her fault: She has babysitter problems. Indeed, her only flaw is an endearing one, which is that she can't stop herself from saying what she thinks at any given moment, no matter how ill-timed it may be. Otherwise, she's a basically good person, and that brings us to the moral of the play, which is that bad things happen to good people--and vice versa. Take Mikey, who believes that his success is his own doing and not a matter of luck, a conviction that has made him resentful and guilt-ridden, two qualities that manifest themselves in his willingness to treat Margie like dirt.

Herein lies part of the phoniness of "Good People." Of course people like Margie and Mikey exist, but I doubt it's a coincidence that they are exactly the kinds of people who fit into the familiar sociological narrative that permeates every page of this play. In Mr. Lindsay-Abaire's America, success is purely a matter of luck, and virtue inheres solely in those who are luckless. So what if Mikey worked hard? Why should anybody deserve any credit for working hard? Hence the crude deck-stacking built into the script of "Good People," in which Mikey is the callous villain who forgot where he came from and Margie the plucky Southie gal who may be the least little bit racist (though she never says anything nasty to Mikey's wife--that would be going too far!) but is otherwise a perfect heroine-victim.

No less phony, though, is the fact that "Good People" plays like a comedy, not a tragedy. For all their grinding poverty, Margie and her Southie friends are incapable of uttering two consecutive lines without tossing in a snappy comeback....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted March 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Turn on, tune in, get serious

In my "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal, I take note of a very important pair of high-culture home video releases, Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus and John Gielgud: Ages of Man. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

In the fledgling years of network TV, Sunday mornings and afternoons were reserved for serious news shows like Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" and high-culture programs of various kinds, a practice so universally accepted that those time slots were collectively known to grumbling journalists as the "cultural ghetto." Little did the grumblers know that a half-century later, the fine arts would have all but vanished from the commercial networks--and would be increasingly hard to find on PBS, the non-commercial network that was originally founded in part to give high culture a safe haven.

I cut my artistic teeth watching TV on Sundays, and now that some of the long-lost programs of my youth have finally made their way to DVD, I find myself astonished by what ABC, CBS and NBC were willing to telecast all those years ago. For those who know PBS as the home of Lawrence Welk reruns and A&E as the network of "Dog the Bounty Hunter," I recommend a pair of releases from E1 Home Video, "Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus" and "John Gielgud: Ages of Man." Between them, they'll open your eyes to the unlimited possibilities of TV as a force for cultural good--and fill you with despair at the fact that such high-minded programming has largely disappeared from the small screen.

"Omnibus" was a cultural TV magazine underwritten by the Ford Foundation that shuttled among the three networks in the '50s. Hosted by Alistair Cooke, it offered viewers glimpses of everything from Orson Welles' "King Lear" to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, but it is best remembered by historians of American music for having introduced Leonard Bernstein to TV audiences. Unlike his later "Young People's Concerts," Bernstein's seven "Omnibus" shows were made specifically for adult viewers, and they used the medium in a way that remains electrifyingly fresh to this day....

If anything, "Ages of Man" is more remarkable still, consisting as it does of a hundred-minute program in which the most admired classical actor of the 20th century, standing alone on a near-bare stage in a business suit, does nothing whatsoever but recite and talk about sonnets by and excerpts from the plays of William Shakespeare. Gielgud had performed this one-man show around the world between 1957 and 1966, when he brought its phenomenally successful run to a close by filming it for CBS. The black-and-white telecast, directed by Paul Bogart, is as devoid of high-tech gimmickry as a slab of rare roast beef: Virtually all of the show is shot in close-up, and Gielgud's comments are as unobtrusive as the dirt-plain set. Yet it is precisely because of this simplicity that "Ages of Man" is so priceless...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," Leonard Bernstein's first Omnibus telecast:

Posted March 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident."

W.H. Auden, "The Protestant Mystics"

Posted March 04, 12:00 AM

March 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)
• 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)
• 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 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 SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SOON IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream and Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, playing in rotating repertory through Mar. 19-20, reviewed here)

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

Posted March 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, 'I should like to hear some music,' mean what they appear to mean, or merely, 'At this moment I should like to forget myself.' When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true."

W.H. Auden, "Interlude: West's Disease"

Posted March 03, 12:00 AM

March 2, 2011

TT: Snapshot

Virgil Thomson talks about ragtime in Kansas City:

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

Posted March 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One can only blaspheme if one believes."

W.H. Auden, "Concerning the Unpredictable"

Posted March 02, 12:00 AM

March 1, 2011

TT: Done and done (and done and done)

Danse Russe, the backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring on which Paul Moravec and I have been working for the past few months, is done. I signed off on the piano-vocal score over the weekend, and Paul made his final corrections and shipped the finished product off to his publishers yesterday. It is now going out to the members of the cast of the first production of our second opera, which opens in Philadelphia on April 28. All that remains for Paul to do (and it is, lest we forget, a big "all") is finish orchestrating the score, a back-breaking job in which I play no part. My job is pretty much over until the show goes into rehearsal next month.

I have to admit that I don't feel quite as excited as I did when we delivered the finished score of The Letter to the Santa Fe Opera. This is mostly because Danse Russe is, after all, our second opera. It's not that we're jaded--writing a comic opera is a very different proposition from writing an opera noir--but having been around the track once, we already knew which way to go to get to the finish line.

Almost as important, though, is the fact that my plate is piled high with work these days. In addition to wrapping up Danse Russe, I've been working on the first draft of my Duke Ellington biography and directing the first staged reading of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play. That's a lot of firsts in a row, and when you factor in the fact that I knock out a minimum of six columns for The Wall Street Journal and write a twenty-five-hundred-word essay for Commentary each month, it means that I'm pretty damned busy.

So no, I didn't break the neck of a bottle of champagne yesterday, nor do I plan to do so today. Instead, I'll be working on a pile on expense reports, an indispensable part of the life of a peripatetic drama critic, and wishing I were in Winter Park with Mrs. T. Tomorrow I'll present a literary award (about which more after it happens) and attend a preview of the Broadway revival of That Championship Season, and on Thursday I'll fly back down to Orlando and my beloved spouse.

It turns out that finishing an opera, like finishing a hat, isn't quite so big a deal when you've made a lot of hats. But that doesn't mean it isn't big enough:

There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat...
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.

And that's that. For today, anyway.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

It comes with the artistic temperament. Wagner said, after Die Walküre, "Ach, just more verdammte gods...maybe I'll burn them all!" Don't forget to feel happy and proud of yourself. All the things in the pipeline should never distract from any one of them.

That's good advice from a good friend.

Posted March 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

W.H. Auden, "Reading"

Posted March 01, 12:00 AM