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February 29, 2012

TT: Snapshot

A 1974 TV interview with S.J. Perelman:

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

Posted February 29, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Posted February 29, 12:00 AM

February 28, 2012

TT: What goes around...

The last time I went to a film screening was when I saw Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco prior to its release in 1998. I was writing a profile of Whit for Civilization, part of which eventually made it into the Teachout Reader, and I interviewed him a few weeks later. It turned out to be the last time I saw him in person, for he went abroad to live not long after that, and he made no more films after The Last Days of Disco--until now.

Yesterday afternoon Whit sent me an e-mail from out of the blue asking if I'd like to see Damsels in Distress, his long-awaited fourth film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 6. I wrote back at once saying yes, and a few hours later I was sitting in the front row of a screening room in midtown Manhattan, remembering how it felt to see The Last Days of Disco for the first time fourteen years ago. I felt a brief pang of nostalgia as I thought about the myriad things that have happened to me since then, some wonderful and some terrible, and marveled at how so many years could pass so quickly. Then the lights went down, and within seconds I was caught up in Damsels.

This won't be a review--that'll have to wait--but I do want to say that if you've been wondering whatever happened to Whit Stillman, the answer is, quite simply, that he got better. Damsels is a poem of innocence, sweet, smart, whimsical, and singularly touching. Like his other films, it won't suit everybody, and I don't doubt that a few people will hate every second of it. Not me. I was carried away, and when it was over, I wanted to see it again on the spot.

Here's a line from Damsels that I scribbled down on the fly, I hope accurately:

I adore optimism, even when it's absurd--perhaps especially then.

If that speaks to you, so will Damsels in Distress.

* * *

The theatrical trailer for Damsels in Distress:

Posted February 28, 12:00 AM

TT: ...comes around

Here's the piece about Whit Stillman that I wrote for Civilization in 1998. It breathes the air of another time, and of course the costume drama mentioned toward the end never got made...but I still like it anyway.

* * *

Contrary to conventional highbrow wisdom, there are plenty of smart movies being made nowadays: they're just not being made in Hollywood. Most of the American films I've liked best in the past couple of years--Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, Doug Liman's Swingers, Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers, Daisy von Scherler Mayer's Party Girl--have been small-scale productions, often shot in and around New York, whose characters spend much of their on-screen time conversing about romance and its discontents. These chatty comedies, which are nothing if not smart, are the product of a youth-oriented urban subculture whose most gifted member, unlikely as it may sound, is 46-year-old Whit Stillman, who writes, directs and produces wonderfully funny movies about the awkward love lives of what one of his characters calls the "urban haute bourgeoisie."

Stillman has been dubbed the Woody Allen of WASPdom, a comparison which does him no justice (though it's increasingly a compliment to Allen). To be sure, his first two films, Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994), featured a cast of upper-class snobs who at first glance seemed in their own way as insular as the neurotic New Yorkers of Manhattan or Deconstructing Harry. But the problems of Stillman's well-heeled, angst-ridden twentysomethings, it turned out, had as much to do with age as class: fresh out of school, they found themselves swept up in a complicated, unforgiving world for which their sheltered lives had left them unprepared. This melancholic exchange between two Stillman preppies, one in his early twenties and the other in his late forties, says everything about the rarefied milieu in which his films are set: "Do you think it's true that, generally speaking, people from this sort of background are doomed to failure?" "'Doomed'? That would make it easier. We just fail, without being doomed, which is worse."

Metropolitan and Barcelona are both sparkling comedies, and not the kind you'd expect from a member in good standing of the urban haute bourgeoisie, either. For one thing, Stillman views his characters' angst with wry detachment. "These people have nothing to pity themselves about," he says firmly. "They should not be in a situation where they're feeling sorry for themselves." In any case, his real interest is not in old money but young love, and how it has fared in the wake of the sexual revolution. The debutantes of Metropolitan have barely discovered sex, while the leading men of Barcelona are obsessed with it; both are anxiously searching for the right thing to do in a culture without rules. That's what makes his movies every bit as much a part of the indie-flick subculture as, say, Kevin Smith's Clerks, an edgy, sexually blunt comedy set in a convenience store somewhere in deepest New Jersey: Stillman's long-winded preppies and yuppies, just like Smith's grubby Gen-X slackers, are lost in postmodern America, looking for an exit sign.

The Last Days of Disco, Stillman's third and latest film, brings the lost souls of Metropolitan and Barcelona still closer to the present: it is set in the early '80s, just before ordinary people stopped worrying about herpes and started worrying about AIDS. Alice Kinnon (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte Pingress (Kate Beckinsale) work at menial jobs in publishing during the day, then party every night at a trendy club not unlike Studio 54. They pretend to be sexually experienced, though nothing could be further from the truth (Alice, in fact, turns out to be what used to be called a "technical" virgin), because they assume that such knowledge is expected of them. The consequences of their deception turn out to be no laughing matter--they disrupt their own lives and inadvertently hurt the equally inexperienced men whose paths they cross--but Stillman tells their tale with the lightest of touches, and what starts out as a witty sendup of the club scene soon turns unexpectedly poignant and involving.

The filmmaker lives in a Greenwich Village apartment surrounded by avant-garde art galleries, far from the tony Park Avenue addresses from which most of his characters originally hail (though few of them end up going back there). He was busy doing a last-minute cleanup job on the soundtrack when I visited him, but even though the film's release date was mere days away, he seemed perfectly happy to take an hour off from his frenzied search for the perfect set of church bells to dub into the climactic scene.

Stillman doesn't talk in the earnest, slightly stilted manner of a Whit Stillman character. Though he is soft-spoken to the point of occasional inaudibility, it doesn't take much to get him wound up, at which point the words start gushing forth like water from a fire hose, leaving the interviewer with nothing to do except keep one eye on the tape recorder and hope the batteries hold out. I asked him, for example, if he watched other people's movies, and got this airport-circling reply: "I like very much the New York school of independent film comedy. Nancy Savoca, Jim Jarmusch when he's funny, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion--things like that. I loved Babe. And I like big Hollywood action films, if they're honest. I liked Air Force One and Apollo 13. I loved the films that John Ford and Hitchcock made, too, but I can't really relate them to anything I do. I'm from the TV generation, and for me the problem was, where can you go to tell stories within your limitations? I read F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was 16, and decided I wanted to be a novelist, but I wasn't cut out for it. I didn't think logically, and I couldn't do voices, or create an omniscient narrator--I had to write everything in the first person.

"Then I found an alternative in the sitcoms of the 60's and 70's. They really seemed to deal with life, but in a very funny way, and were unpretentious about it. When I started trying to write scripts instead of novels, it was completely liberating. The voice of each character is a first-person voice, but it's not me: an actor or actress is going to play it, which means that somehow I'm not really responsible for it. I didn't have to think logically, either. In fact, not going from A to B to C is much better in film comedy. If you think in terms of non sequitur, it's a little less boring."

Stillman is unapologetic about the fact that his movies consist primarily of people talking to one another. "Some visual purists still think film is pictures at an exhibition," he says. "They seem to forget that we've been making sound films ever since the '20s. Talk is incredibly important. If you want to make a movie about what people are like, you have to show how they talk and what they say. I make romantic comedies about fairly young people, and Erik Erikson says somewhere that young love is almost all conversation: people holding mirrors up to each other though conversation, trying to figure out who they are and who the other person is, and whether there's something that can link the two. If they couldn't talk, it would be just awful. Of course you have to be very careful with it, and I understand why all the screenwriting gurus warn against too much dialogue, but I think they're making a mistake. Even action films often have very good dialogue, though there isn't necessarily a lot of it. What's the charm of a buddy comedy? Just to see two guys shooting bullets? It's what the two guys say to each other that matters."

Stillman's Theory of the Buddy Movie is about to be put to the test, minus the bullets: his next movie will be an old-fashioned costume drama. "I plan to go back to the 18th century," he says, "and write a dramatic story that has adventure elements. I think I know how not to make it stilted and affected, but what I don't quite know how to get around yet is how to make it interesting if there's nothing funny in it. I think there can be funny stuff in it, but the engine has to be dramatic." It'll be quite a departure for the maker of The Last Days of Disco, but if anyone can put a new twist on swordplay and swashbuckling, it's Whit Stillman, the poet of urban haute-bourgeois anxiety.

Posted February 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Posted February 28, 12:00 AM

February 27, 2012

TT: P.P.C.

My trip to Florida is now history, and I have a hell of a rough week ahead of me. In addition to seeing two shows, writing two pieces for The Wall Street Journal and one for Commentary, and helping to edit a Festschrift in honor of an esteemed colleague, I've got a Satchmo at the Waldorf script conference coming up on Tuesday. On Sunday I fly to Texas to do a three-day dog-and-pony show for the students of Baylor University, where I'll be talking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and various other things.

For all these reasons, I don't expect to be blogging this week or next (except for the usual almanac entries, videos, and theater-related postings, which will continue like clockwork).

Till soon.

Posted February 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

David Frye impersonates Gregory Peck, James Mason, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, William F. Buckley, Jr., Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967:

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

Posted February 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."

Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge

Posted February 27, 12:00 AM

February 24, 2012

TT: Howard Kissel, R.I.P.

Howard Kissel was a familiar face on the New York theater scene for well over thirty years. Best remembered as the longtime drama critic of the New York Daily News and the biographer of David Merrick, he had an extraordinarily wide range of cultural interests, and in recent months he had been displaying them to excellent effect on his Huffington Post blog, to which he made his final posting mere days before he died.

He was the best of all possible colleagues, forthright, funny, and exceedingly, unfailingly kind, not only to me but also to Mrs. T, who adored him. His last years, alas, were difficult, both for professional and personal reasons, and when he underwent a liver transplant, it was widely feared that his career was over. Incredibly, he was back at it a few months later, and though he was visibly weakened by his trials, he seemed never to lose his gusto.

Howard was the first critic in New York who went out of his way to befriend me. When I started writing about theater for The Wall Street Journal, he warned me of the dangers of burning out, and it pleased him greatly that I never showed any signs of doing so, any more than he did.

I cannot imagine never again seeing Howard's unmistakable features in a Broadway theater. For me, there will always be an empty seat on the aisle.

* * *

Howard Kissel recites a Shakespeare sonnet for Michael Riedel at the Players Club:

UPDATE: Howard's New York Daily News obituary is here.

Posted February 24, 11:01 AM

TT: The right end of the telescope

My drama column in today's Wall Street Journal is devoted in its entirety to Classic Stage Company's revival of Galileo. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Classic Stage Company, long one of New York's most impressive Off-Broadway troupes, has been hitting the bull's-eye with rousing consistency this season. Having just mounted a "Cherry Orchard" that topped my list of revivals in 2011, CSC has now gone on to crack an even tougher nut, Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo." Brian Kulick's staging, in which F. Murray Abraham plays the Italian scientist who dared to pit the evidence of his eyes against the dictates of faith, is a profoundly and comprehensively satisfying achievement, the kind of show that sends you home feeling disinclined ever again to waste your time seeing anything less good.

Mr. Abraham is not, however, the star of the show. That honor belongs to Charles Laughton, whose translation of "Galileo" is being used in this production. Prepared in the closest possible collaboration with Brecht himself for the 1947 American premiere in Los Angeles, in which the star of "Mutiny on the Bounty" and "The Private Life of Henry VIII" played the title role, this English-language rendering of the second version of "Galileo" (there are three) is a wonder, a translation that is both speakable and memorable....

Why is so great a play so rarely performed in this country? Because Brecht conceived of "Galileo" as a grand pageant requiring a huge cast. In 2010 I saw a large-scale production of "Galileo" at Sarasota's Asolo Repertory Theatre that was outstanding in every way, and it fielded a budget-busting cast of 24. The original 1947 staging, which transferred to Broadway later that year, used 34 actors. Mr. Kulick, by contrast, is presenting "Galileo" in CSC's 180-seat black-box performing space with just nine actors, most of whom play multiple roles. While this intimate approach inevitably deprives "Galileo" of its cavalcade-like aspect, it also allows Mr. Kulick and his cast to enact the play with Shakespearean speed and directness. You feel as though you're watching far-off historical events through Galileo's own powerful telescope, an impression reinforced by Adrianne Lobel's amazing set, which turns the theater into a miniature planetarium.

Mr. Abraham gives us a lean, sardonic Galileo (he looks almost like one of El Greco's famished saints) whose avowals of the joys of the flesh never quite ring true. That, however, is the only false note in his performance, which conveys Galileo's hope and anguish with absolute authority....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Small-town people manage to endure the inexorable proximity of their lives only by deceiving themselves into thinking that nobody knows what they couldn't not know."

William Maxwell, Ancestors: A Family History

Posted February 24, 12:00 AM

February 23, 2012

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:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, 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)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, closes June 17, reviewed here)
• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, extended throug Mar. 18, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Blood Knot (drama, G/PG-13, possible for unusually mature children, closes Mar. 11, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Look Back in Anger (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 8, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Once in a Lifetime (comedy, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Feb. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

Posted February 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It would be difficult to prove that saints do not enjoy the trouble they make."

William Maxwell, Ancestors: A Family History

Posted February 23, 12:00 AM

February 22, 2012

TT: Found poem

These are the working titles of the thirteen chapters of Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. (I say "working" because even though I no longer expect to change them, you never know.) As was the case with the chapter titles of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, they are all phrases that were spoken by Ellington at one time or another in his life:

• "I want to tell America"

• "I just couldn't be shackled"

• "Soft and gut-bucket"

• "My ear makes my decision"

• "A higher plateau"

• "The way the president travels"

• "The eyes in the back of my head"

• "The sea of expectancy"

• "We didn't believe in categories"

• "More a business than an art"

• "I was born in 1956"

• "Fate's being kind to me"

• "That big yawning void"

I think they make a rather nice little poem, don't you?

Posted February 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Kenneth Tynan interviews Laurence Olivier in 1966:

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

Posted February 22, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Honors go to those who want them."

Michael Oakeshott (quoted in Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, courtesy of Tim Hulsey)

Posted February 22, 12:00 AM

February 21, 2012

TT: Almanac

"What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

Posted February 21, 12:00 AM

February 20, 2012

TT: At full tilt

I went at Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington with hammer and tongs last week, and by the time I was done, I'd written the first 16,000 words of the fifth chapter, which will take Ellington from 1929 to 1933.

Appropriately enough, one of the things that I wrote was a discussion of "Mood Indigo" itself. I especially like this paragraph:

Ellington is said to have thought "Old Man Blues" to be his best composition yet. It's easy to see why he was so pleased with it, but "Mood Indigo," recorded two months later by a seven-piece combo drawn from the band, is even more inspired, and unlike "Old Man Blues," which was rarely heard in later years, it became a permanent and beloved part of the band's working repertoire. A nocturne whose "exquisitely tired and four-in-the-morning" atmosphere (in Constant Lambert's phrase) he would evoke time and again, "Mood Indigo" opens with a three-part chorale intoned by muted trumpet, muted trombone, and low-register clarinet, the same combination that André Previn had in mind when he marveled at how "Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don't know what it is." Then Barney Bigard steps out from the ensemble to play the tune, a rich and shapely melody backed by the tick-tock strokes of Freddy Guy's banjo and the smooth, steady walk of the rest of the rhythm section. Arthur Whetsel plays a delicate solo and Ellington flutters gracefully through a lacy four-bar piano interlude, after which the chorale is repeated as the record spins to a close. Two months later the full band re-recorded "Mood Indigo," but Ellington knew better than to tamper with the scoring of the introductory chorale. It is as simple--and unforgettable--as a proverb.

I'm feeling good about the book again. Can you tell?

* * *

A Snader Telescriptions film of "Mood Indigo" performed by the Ellington orchestra in 1951. The clarinet solo is by Jimmy Hamilton. The arrangement, by Billy Strayhorn, is significantly different from the one described above:

Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier "play" "Mood Indigo" in the 1961 film Paris Blues. Newman's trombone was dubbed by Murray McEachern. The onscreen pianist is Aaron Bridgers, Billy Strayhorn's first lover:

Posted February 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

Elaine May and Mike Nichols appear in a commercial for General Electric:

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

Posted February 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason."

G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn

Posted February 20, 12:00 AM

February 17, 2012

TT: See me, hear me (cont'd)

If you're going to be in or near Winter Park, Florida, on Sunday afternoon, I'll be making a public appearance at Rollins College under the auspices of Winter Park's Bach Festival.

Quoth the press release:

Join us for a lively discussion about the work and legacy of J.S. Bach with guest scholar Dr. Christoph Wolff, conductor Dr. John Sinclair, and Wall Street Journal arts writer Terry Teachout.

I'd say that's straightforward enough!

For those not in the know, Dr. Wolff is one of the world's great Bach scholars, Dr. Sinclair is the chairman of the music department at Rollins and the Bach Festival's head honcho, and I'm...well, me. I'll be moderating the chat, and I promise to keep things both lively and fully accessible to the interested layman.

The program starts at one p.m. in the Galloway Room of the Cornell Campus Center. Admission is free, but you have to reserve a seat in advance by calling 407-646-2182. You can also order a box lunch (I'm having one).

For more information, go here.

Posted February 17, 1:48 PM

TT: Waiting for Mandela

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a review of Signature Theatre's off-Broadway revival of Blood Knot. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Audiences in New York haven't been able to see much of the work of Athol Fugard, South Africa's greatest playwright, in recent years, but his stock is now taking a sharp leap upward. In addition to the Roundabout Theatre Company's current Broadway revival of "The Road to Mecca," Signature Theatre is mounting three Fugard productions this season, the first of which, "Blood Knot," has been directed by the author himself. That alone is reason to go, since "Blood Knot," the 1961 two-man play that introduced Mr. Fugard to the world's stages, is a modern classic, a play that moves with stealthy sureness from a quiet, almost nonchalant start to an overwhelming conclusion. To see what Mr. Fugard has done with it would be a must even if his staging were less effective--and he has done exactly right by "Blood Knot." If you don't find this revival enthralling, you're not thrillable.

Mr. Fugard's two characters, Zach (Colman Domingo) and Morris (Scott Shepherd), live together in a pathetic-looking one-room shack built out of cardboard boxes and corrugated iron. Zach is dark-skinned, Morris light-skinned, and if you were to see them walking down the street, you'd never guess that they were related, much less that they are half-brothers. Cut off from the world by poverty, they spend their free time playing out child-like fantasies together. It is this penchant for fantasy that inspires Morris to find a female pen-pal for his illiterate brother, who longs in vain for a real live girl (Zach dictates his letters to Morris, who polishes up his grammar, then reads the replies to him). What starts out as a gentle working-class variation on "The Shop Around the Corner" then turns deadly serious when Ethel, Zach's correspondent, suggests that they meet, enclosing a snapshot which reveals that she is white.

Mr. Fugard could have developed this promising scenario in any number of conventionally "effective" ways. Instead, taking Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" as his point of departure, he has sketched the plight of his characters plight in a way that is partly comic and partly surreal....

The verdict of posterity has yet to be handed down on the rest of Mr. Fugard's oeuvre, but judging by this revival, I'd say that "Blood Knot" will remain fresh for some time to come. The reason for its freshness is that Mr. Fugard, though he leaves you in no doubt of the play's political implications, embeds them in poetic symbolism rather than stooping to the kind of explicit sermonizing that kills so many political plays stone dead.

Mr. Fugard has staged "Blood Knot" with a similarly light touch, emphasizing the play's slapstick physicality and allowing its sweetness free rein. Messrs. Domingo and and Shepherd are no less alive to the comedy of "Blood Knot," so much so that they reminded me at times of Laurel and Hardy....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Five to revive

Today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column is an annotated list of five rarely-seen plays deserving of revival. The plays are S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part, Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden, Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears, Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

What's coming to Broadway this spring? Among other things, two familiar American plays that are widely regarded as modern classics are slated for high-profile revivals.

The first is "Death of a Salesman," which was premiered on Broadway in 1949 and revived there in 1975, 1984 and 1999. In addition, it was filmed in 1951 and has been performed on TV four times.

The second is "A Streetcar Named Desire," which was premiered in 1947 and revived in 1950, 1956, 1973 (twice), 1988, 1992 and 2005. In addition, it was filmed in 1951 and has been performed on TV twice.

Enough already!

Yes, I'll give both shows a fair shake. That's my job. But all things being equal, I'd rather review a show that hasn't been so often that you can recite the lines along with the actors. In fact, what I'd really like is to review something that I've never seen--and even though I go to more than a hundred shows each year, there are any number of worthwhile plays, some of them important, that I have yet to see onstage.

If, like me, you're more than ready to send Stanley Kowalski and Willy Loman on a nice long vacation, I invite you to consider this wish list of five rarely revived plays that I've never been lucky enough to see....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted February 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect."

Willa Cather, "The Novel Démeublé"

Posted February 17, 12:00 AM

February 16, 2012

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:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, 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)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, extended through June 17, reviewed here)
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, extended throug Mar. 18, 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)
• Look Back in Anger (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 8, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Once in a Lifetime (comedy, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Feb. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 26, reviewed here)

Posted February 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life."

Willa Cather, "Joseph and His Brothers"

Posted February 16, 12:00 AM

February 15, 2012

TT: Snapshot

A 1958 BBC TV interview with Kingsley Amis:

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

Posted February 15, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Posted February 15, 12:00 AM

February 14, 2012

TT: Now's the time

Shakespeare & Company has announced performance dates for the New England premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-man-two-character play about Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, which stars John Douglas Thompson and will be directed by Gordon Edelstein. Opening night is August 22, 2012, and the show will run through September 2 at the Founders' Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Tickets go on sale today. We expect them to sell briskly, so if you're interested in coming, don't dally.

For more information, or to purchase tickets on line, go here. You can also call the box office at 413-637-3353.

UPDATE: I just received this e-mail from a Playwright Who Must Remain Nameless:

a critic who's a working playwright!!!!!! outrageous!!!!! outlandish!!!!!! impossible!!!!!!! hoorah!

And yes, I'm smiling. Broadly.

Posted February 14, 10:35 AM

TT: Motto

I put this Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back of my business card around the time that it started looking like Satchmo at the Waldorf was going to get produced.

No, I'm not having second thoughts:

Posted February 14, 10:30 AM

TT: All-American (II)

One good list deserves another, so here are the ten American plays I most wish I'd written. The second "play" is actually an evening-long bill of one-act plays by the same author, but it's my list, so I decided to count it as a single work.

As with my previous list of American novels, the word best was nowhere in my mind when I drew up this roster. Since I've lately become a playwright myself, I suppose you could say that I have more of a stake in this list than its predecessor, but the standards for inclusion are identical: these are the ten American plays that mean the most to me personally. I love them and identify with them, and though I will never live long enough to write anything remotely as good, they collectively define the kind of play I'd like to be able to write:

• Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful

• William Inge, Come Back, Little Sheba

• David Ives, All in the Timing

• Warren Leight, Side Man

• Kenneth Lonergan, The Starry Messenger

• David Mamet, American Buffalo

• Lynn Nottage, Crumbs from the Table of Joy

• Thornton Wilder, Our Town

• Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

• August Wilson, Fences

Posted February 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."

Willa Cather, One of Ours

Posted February 14, 12:00 AM

February 13, 2012

TT: "Make everything more beautiful"

Patrick Kurp's thoughtful response to the list of ten American novels that I posted the other day contained this observation:

Some of the satisfactions I once found in fiction--human drama, moral complexity, memorable language--I now find more reliably elsewhere, in poetry, history and biography. One of good fiction's chief virtues, the way it encourages self-forgetting as we inhabit the lives of others, is often better accomplished in other forms.

I'm not sure that I'd say often, but I do know that I spend more time reading history and biography than fiction, and I don't know why. I truly love the novels on my list, and many more as well, but all things being equal, I'm somewhat more likely to be reading non-fiction than fiction at any given moment. This has always been so. I tend to read fiction in spurts--I recently spent a whole week revisiting the novels of William Maxwell--whereas there is rarely a time when I'm not either reading, consulting, or writing about a non-fiction book.

This doubtless has much to do with the nature of my work, and it may also have something to do with the fact that I don't write fiction. On the other hand, I've written three plays and two opera libretti in the past two years, a development without precedent in my writing life and one that puzzles me greatly. I simply don't understand how or why I have suddenly found within myself the desire and ability to write for the stage. As I recently told a friend, it feels as though I've grown another arm.

It will be interesting to see whether this belated change of life causes me to spend more time reading novels. (I already spend quite enough time reading and watching plays!) Perhaps, consciously or not, I've developed in middle age a greater need for what fiction alone has to offer. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of one of the mysterious cycles of life to which all of us are subject. Eight years ago I noticed with like puzzlement that I seemed to be less interested in music: "It's as if I've become alienated from myself, in much the same way that the victim of a stroke might feel he was no longer himself. I'm not all here."

Needless to say, the I to whom I referred in that posting came back, if not so decisively as I expected: I spend noticeably less time listening to music now than I did a decade ago, though I don't think that I love it any less. The sad and inescapable truth is that there are only so many hours in the day, and you can only spend them doing one thing at a time. (Playing music while doing something else is not the same thing as listening to it.) It is also inescapably true that there are only so many hours in a lifetime, and at fifty-six, I'm intensely aware of wanting to use the ones that I have left to me as well as possible. I long to spend less time spinning my wheels and more time "making everything more beautiful."

That last phrase, which is a favorite of mine, comes from an essay by Fairfield Porter: "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful." In the past I believed that the only way I could accomplish that goal was by being a good critic and a loving friend and companion. Now it appears that it could also be within my power to accomplish it by being a good playwright and librettist. May it be so!

Posted February 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

A cleaned-up version of Gypsy Rose Lee's strip routine, from the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen:

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

Posted February 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Oh, my dear little librarian, you pile up enough tomorrows and you'll find yourself with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays."

Meredith Willson, The Music Man

Posted February 13, 12:00 AM

February 10, 2012

TT: All talking! All laughing!

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to an important regional revival of Once in a Lifetime in Sarasota, Florida. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

If you're a theater buff with a serious interest in American comedy, "Once in a Lifetime" probably ranks high on the list of little-known shows you'd love to see onstage. Otherwise, I doubt you've heard of it. A farce about the coming of talking pictures to Hollywood, "Once in a Lifetime" was the first collaboration between George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who went on to write "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "You Can't Take It With You." It opened on Broadway in 1930 and ran for 406 performances, which was big business back then. Two years later, it was turned into a middling movie, then vanished from sight (the 1979 Broadway revival was a flop). Today the play is known solely because Mr. Hart wrote about how it came to Broadway in "Act One," his 1959 autobiography.

Why doesn't anybody do "Once in a Lifetime" nowadays? It costs too much--way too much. The published script calls for five sets and 38 actors. You could get away with that in the Thirties, but no commercial producer would think of bringing so horrendously expensive a play to Broadway anymore. Enter San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater and Sarasota's Asolo Repertory Theatre, two regional companies that double as drama schools, making it possible for them to put on large-cast shows by using students to cover smaller parts. A.C.T. mounted "Once in a Lifetime" last fall and Asolo Rep is doing it now, and both versions, not coincidentally, were directed by the same man, Mark Rucker.

Since the two productions are identical in concept--most of the members of the cast play double, triple and quadruple roles--I tossed a coin and elected to see "Once in a Lifetime" at Asolo Rep, whose version makes use of 19 actors, four more than at A.C.T. It was worth the trip. "Once in a Lifetime" proves to be as fresh as any of the later screwball comedies on whose screenplays it surely left a mark (not to mention "Singin' in the Rain," whose authors, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, must have had it in mind).

"Once in a Lifetime" is the story of George, Jerry and May (Jason Bradley, Andrew Carter and Hillary Clemens), a trio of small-time vaudeville hoofers who see the premiere of "The Jazz Singer" in New York and decide to go to Hollywood, pass themselves off as authorities on elocution and make their fortune by teaching silent-movie actors how to talk....

This premise is so familiar that you have to remind yourself that Kaufman and Hart were the first writers ever to turn it into a plot. Part of what makes "Once in a Lifetime" more than just a historical curiosity is the jaundiced wit with which the characters comment on the head-banging craziness that surrounds them. (Jerry, working a crossword puzzle: "What's a four-letter word for actor?" May: "Dope.") But mere wisecracks won't make a play fly. That's where craftsmanship comes in, and the authors of "Once in a Lifetime" knew their stuff. Every piece of the puzzle fits together with a crisp, satisfying click...

Ms. Clemens, who gave a poignant performance as the tomboy in Writers' Theatre's 2008 Chicago revival of "Picnic," plays May as a spunky, cloche-hatted girl-next-door who knows how to snap off a punch line, which is just right....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The 1932 film adaptation of Once in a Lifetime:

Aline MacMahon, who plays May, created the role in the original Brighton Beach tryout of the stage version, but was replaced on Broadway by Jean Dixon. She later appeared in the play's Los Angeles premiere.

Posted February 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The patience most people have for someone else's grief is short-lived. The display of a measured grief is comforting. It implies order, and even benevolence (for being designed of sensible proportions) to process of life that we don't understand well, can understand only if we have gone through them. Profound grief suggests mysteries at the heart of human existence that cannot be prepared for, which can come at any time, and into any life."

Alec Wilkinson, A Violent Act

Posted February 10, 12:00 AM

February 9, 2012

TT: All-American

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's a list of the ten American novels I most wish I'd written.

Note that I didn't say best or greatest or significant or anything so highfalutin. This is a purely personal inventory, reflective only of admiration, love, and--if a reader who has no gift whatsoever for the writing of prose fiction can use the word--identification. These books speak to me, and if I could write a novel, they collectively represent the kind of novel I'd like to write:

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

• William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

• Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness

• Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

• Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

UPDATE: Patrick Kurp responds, thoughtfully as always. Some of his picks, not surprisingly, came within inches of making my list.

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, 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)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, extended through June 17, reviewed here)
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 26, reviewed here)
• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, 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)
• Look Back in Anger (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 8, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, remounting of Broadway production, adult subject matter, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA MONICA:
• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, suitable for mature children, original run reviewed here)

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The music started off at Bach's typical quick trot, a pace which, being uniform and neither fast nor slow, the pace of the mind rather than of the emotions, left Eustace respectful but unmoved. This was a case for understanding, not feeling, and he did not undestand."

L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

Posted February 09, 12:00 AM

February 8, 2012

TT: Reveille

On Monday Mrs. T and I decided to take the long way from Sarasota to Winter Park. Shunning the interstate highways, we drove down two-lane roads that passed by countless orange groves and through tiny towns with names like Ona, Zolfo Springs, Avon Park, and--my favorite--Frostproof. Even the landmarks along the way bore picturesque names (first Troublesome Creek, then Peace River). Alas, we were only passing through, for I would have liked to spend a night at the Hotel Jacaranda, whose website recalls the long-ago days when Clark Gable and Babe Ruth graced its spacious rooms. But we had to return to Winter Park in time to meet a dinner guest, so we kept on driving.

As Mrs. T napped, I turned on the car radio and listened to Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, whose brisk, jazz-flavored outer movements flank a seraphically tranquil evocation of the Larghetto of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. It flows with such seemingly uncomplicated grace that one marvels at Ravel's confession that he found it all but impossible to write. "Flows so easily! Flows so easily!" he sputtered to a colleague who praised its apparent effortlessness. "I put it together bar by bar and I nearly died over it." Midway through the movement, Mrs. T awoke, looked out the window at the orange trees, and said, "They look like treasure." Then she fell asleep again.

I can never hear the slow movement of the Ravel Concerto in G without feeling that I'm being offered a momentary glimpse of a world beyond that which we see around us, one that is simple and serene and devoid of pain or sorrow or doubt. The glimpse comes toward the end of the movement, when the music modulates without warning into a new key. It sounds like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a slate-gray sky. My eyes always fill with tears when I hear that passage, and they did so yet again on Monday, right on cue.

What gives music such inexplicable power? I've spent the whole of my life immersed in that mysterious art, yet I haven't a clue as to what it is that makes me weep when I hear such things. All I know is that no other art makes me more intensely aware of life's cruel brevity, or of the brief moments of piercing beauty that make such knowledge supportable.

Samuel Beckett said it: "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on." To drive past an orange grove while listening to the Adagio assai of the Concerto in G is to be awakened, if only for a moment or two, to the beauty at the heart of things, to be fully alive for as long as we have it in us. Sooner or later habit will always lull us back into the terrible sleep of everyday life--but then a great work of art sounds reveille, and we sit bolt upright, see treasure, and weep.

* * *

Martha Argerich plays the slow movement of Maurice Ravel's Concerto in G:

Posted February 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

The novelist William Maxwell talks about his life and work and reads his favorite poem, "Diffugere Nives," A.E. Housman's translation of an ode by Horace. Maxwell was ninety years old when this film was made in 1999:

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

Posted February 08, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Stephen was in the habit of putting inverted commas round a cliché; it was his way of discrediting those aspects of the commonplace, and they were many, which offended against whatever might be his pose of the moment."

L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

Posted February 08, 12:00 AM

February 7, 2012

TT: The case of the mysterious ashtray

My brother just found this curio in the house where we grew up. He writes:

Do you know anyone in your travels who might be able to identify this ashtray? The red- and blue-tipped sticks are matches. They're on a solid roll that spins inside the disc. The words inscribed inside the ribbon underneat the unicorn are SEMPER EADEM.

Drop me a line if you can shed any light:

Posted February 07, 10:52 AM

TT: Almanac

"Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."

Jonathan Swift, "Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting"

Posted February 07, 12:00 AM

February 6, 2012

TT: Down the road a piece

Today is my fifty-sixth birthday. So what?

Hitting the double nickel last year inspired me to hold forth at length about this and that, not entirely without reason, seeing as how my first play and second opera were both premiered in 2011. Alas, 56 is a thoroughly uninteresting number, and 2012, while it holds a major event in store for me, promises to be routine in other respects. Assuming that nothing cataclysmic intervenes, I'll write a hundred-odd pieces, see a hundred-odd plays, spend a lot of time waiting impatiently in departure lounges, and--I hope--finish the first draft of Mood Indlgo: A Life of Duke Ellington. For me that's standard stuff, and I'm not sure I'd want it any other way, though I do have three never-to-be-acknowledged dreams that I hope will come true between now and year's end. The first is probable, the second not altogether unlikely, while the third is a dismayingly long shot. (None has anything to do with Satchmo at the Waldorf, in case you're wondering.)

Birthdays per se don't mean much to me anymore, save as unwanted reminders of the inexorable approach of the Distinguished Thing. Six years after meeting Mrs. T and surviving a brush with death, I no longer need to be reminded to use well the interval: I've got that down pat, though I seize some days more firmly than others. In fact, I'm much more in need of regular reminders of the value of leisure, at which I'm not nearly good enough. If a philanthropist with money to spare were to offer me a smallish chunk of it, I'd ask my employers for a leave of absence and take Mrs. T on a nice long trip, in the course of which I'd endeavor to write as little as possible. But even the longest, loveliest vacation must end sooner or later, and no sooner would we return home than I'd sit down at my desk and go back to work...and do what?

It isn't quite right to say that I feel the need for a change, since the past few years have been so full of changes. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I'm trying to decide how I want to spend the next part (which may, of course, be the last part) of my life. What shall I do once Satchmo at the Waldorf opens in Lenox and the manuscript of Mood Indigo is shipped off to Gotham Books? Should I embark on yet another biography? Ought I to continue working as a critic? Might I want to try my hand at teaching? Is my first venture into playwriting destined to be a one-shot affair? Above all, I long to know the answer to this question: are my energies best spent as a jack-of-all-trades, or has the time come at last for me to direct my fire at a single target?

The longer I live, the surer I am that the world was made for specialists, and I've always been reluctant to settle into a pigeonhole, however commodious. When I played music, I played many kinds of music on more than one instrument. When I became a critic, I wrote about whatever interested me rather than concentrating on a single medium. When I became a biographer, I jumped from subject to subject (first a journalist, then a choreographer, then a jazzman). No sooner was my first opera libretto produced than I started writing my first play. Yes, it's been fun, but might I have been better served had I concentrated on one thing? While I don't think it's right to call me a dilettante--I've aspired to professional standards in everything to which I've set my hand--I sometimes wonder whether my reluctance to specialize has kept me from doing as well as I might have done in any of my varied lines of work.

Even at fifty-six, it's not quite too late for me to change my ways, or at least modify them. It's well within the realm of possibility that I have twenty-odd years of comparatively undiminished energy ahead of me, and I want to use those years in the best and most satisfying way that I can. Up to now I've operated on the assumption that life itself would tell me what to do next. Will it do so yet again? Or ought I to take courage in hand and place all my chips on a single number? And if so, should it be one of the numbers on which I've successfully bet in the past--or would I do better to try something really different?

Merely to write these words is to smile at their preposterous presumptuousness. I noted seven years ago that "nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I'm not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure." You'd think, then, that I'd know better than to suppose that I could ever point myself in any conceivable direction with a reasonable expectation of getting where I thought I wanted to go. Yet here I am, trying once again to figure out what my next move should be.

The truth is that my next few moves are already set in stone. I've got a book to finish and a play to see onto the stage, The Wall Street Journal still expects to hear from me six times a month, and Paul Moravec and I are just getting started on our third opera. Nor do I have any particularly bright ideas about what to do after that: I have yet to receive an offer of steady employment from a college or think tank, and no matter how well Satchmo at the Waldorf does this summer, I have no illusions about being able to make anything remotely approaching a living by writing plays, much less opera libretti.

In short, nothing has changed--yet. Maybe it won't, and maybe that'll be just fine. Or maybe not. Edward Steichen said it: "Every ten years or so, a man should give himself a good swift kick in the pants!" Am I due?

Posted February 06, 12:00 AM

TT: A sighting of the grail

If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember the following posting from 2005:

Laurette Taylor's performance as Amanda Wingfield in the original 1945 production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is the most vividly remembered piece of acting ever to have taken place on an American stage. Yet nothing remains of it but memories and a few still photographs--some of which can be seen here--since Taylor made no sound films save for the brief screen test included in Broadway: The Golden Age (a documentary you've absolutely got to see, assuming you haven't already). The greatness of her acting is thus like the greatness of Nijinsky's dancing: all who saw her agree on it, but the rest of us must take it on faith.

Or...must we?

After reading that Times story, I did a bit of fugitive Googling, and found something that sent my jaw dropping floorward. It's from the Web site of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is where Taylor's private papers ended up. I was looking at the HRCRC's description of its Taylor collection when I stumbled onto this statement: "A number of published works and recordings were transferred to the HRHRC book collection....Taylor's recordings, mostly 78 RPM, include The Glass Menagerie (1945); a 1939 WJZ radio broadcast of Peg O' My Heart; Among My Souvenirs (1943); a segment of We The People (1945); a Rudy Vallee radio program (1939); and a very early 1913 voice recording trial done of Laurette Taylor in New York."

Excuse me? Am I the last to learn that that there is a sound recording of some portion of Taylor's legendary performance in The Glass Menagerie? Or is its existence not widely known to scholars of American theater in general and Tennessee Williams' work in particular?

Rick McKay, the producer of Broadway: The Golden Age, promptly wrote to assure me that no recording of the original production of The Glass Menagerie exists, in Austin or anywhere else. That, I assumed, was that.

Not so. Over the weekend I received the following e-mail from Reva Cooper, a New York-based arts publicist:

In 2005, you wrote about a Laurette Taylor recording from The Glass Menagerie, and asked if anyone knew where to locate it. I'd heard about it, too, saw your entry on a search about it, and am writing to tell you that I located the recording and just heard it at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The librarian said that due to copyright restrictions, she wasn't allowed to put it online, so you have to go there to hear it....

The recording you're interested in is called We, the People, and is an awards ceremony where [Taylor] is honored by a journalism association. As part of the event she reads scenes from Peg o' My Heart, Outward Bound, and The Glass Menagerie, and discusses her preparation for each of these roles (the scenes aren't listed, and I just wrote to the librarian in followup to suggest that they be added to the index title, to make it easier to locate).

Her Amanda is fascinating, not at all like later Amandas I've seen, much more hardscrabble working class, living in the present in St. Louis, playing against the memory--but suddenly she remembers...and that's the surprise--much more realistic. And her accent is a bit more lower-class Southern than other actresses have used--she said she copied Tennessee Williams' accent.

This is--to put it very mildly--staggering news.

Patricia Neal, who saw Taylor play Amanda Wingfield on Broadway, said in Broadway: The Golden Age that she gave "the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life." According to Harold Prince, "I knew when I watched it, and I sat in the balcony, you'll never see greater acting as long as you live." Given the fact that countless other theater professionals who saw Laurette Taylor's Amanda in the theater have said pretty much the same thing, I can't imagine another hitherto-unknown archival document that would be of more compelling interest to scholars and aficionados of American theater in the twentieth century than a sound recording of Taylor reading a fragment of The Glass Menagerie, however brief. Would that I were in a position to catch the next plane to Austin!

Alas, I'll be otherwise occupied for some time to come, so if anyone who sees this posting has in his possession an air check of the Laurette Taylor episode of We, the People, which aired on CBS from 1936 to 1951, would you please get in touch with me? I'm sure that I'll make it to Austin sooner or later, but later is more likely than sooner, and I'd prefer not to wait any longer than absolutely necessary in order to hear and report on this priceless memento of a great artist at the peak of her powers.

Posted February 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Just because

Caedmon's 1965 studio recording of Montgomery Clift performing the closing scene of The Glass Menagerie. The music, by Paul Bowles, was used in the original 1945 stage production:

An abridged radio performance of the first part of The Glass Menagerie, starring Clift, Helen Hayes, and Karl Malden, originally broadcast live in 1951 on Theater Guild on the Air:

The other parts of the broadcast are here, here, here, and here.

Posted February 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;--and with boundless gratitude to the other. The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another."

Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Priest"

Posted February 06, 12:00 AM

February 3, 2012

HOW CAN SKEPTICS MAKE GREAT RELIGIOUS ART?

Posted February 03, 10:50 AM

TT: Still angry after all these years

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Look Back in Anger. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

It's disorienting to watch the film version of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" fifty-six years after the play on which it was based exploded onto the London stage. The history books assure us that Mr. Osborne swept away the genteel, well-made drawing-room comedies that had long dominated British theater, replacing them with blunt expressions of pent-up rage against the class machine. Yet the first thing you see on screen is an all-white, banjo-powered Dixieland band, for New Orleans-style jazz was the preferred music of England's "angry young men," as Mr. Osborne and his fellow rebels soon came to be known, back in the benighted days before the arrival of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

That's how dated "Look Back in Anger" is, and that's why it's surprising that the Roundabout Theatre Company's new revival, staged with flame-throwing éclat by Sam Gold, should be so theatrically potent. For not only is Mr. Osborne's first play a period piece, but it is an ultra-British period piece, one whose author, not surprisingly, failed to make a lasting impression on American theatergoers. No play of his has been seen on Broadway since 1969. Indeed, "Look Back in Anger" is being mounted at the Laura Pels Theatre rather than in one of the company's Broadway houses, which suggests a certain lack of confidence about its prospects at the box office.

This lack of confidence is understandable, since "Look Back in Anger" is culture-specific and time-bound in a way that presents real problems of understanding to Americans, especially those under 50, who know little of what England was like in 1956. But an effective production can overcome at least some of these problems, and this one is up to the mark, not least because Mr. Gold has fielded a top-of-the-line cast led by Matthew Rhys, who is so exciting as Jimmy Porter, Mr. Osborne's anti-hero and alter ego, that you'll likely be inclined to take his self-lacerating anger for granted rather than trying to puzzle out its source...

I suspect that the first half of "Look Back in Anger" is too deeply rooted in its time and place ever to be fully intelligible to the ordinary American theatergoer. If, on the other hand, you're capable of making sense of such postwar English novels as, say, Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim," then you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on, and Mr. Gold's direction is so passionately precise that it contrives to make most of the rough places plain enough....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The opening scene of the 1958 film version of Look Back in Anger:

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Agnostics in paradise

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, inspired by a scene in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Look Back in Anger, I consider the seeming paradox of religious art created by skeptics. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Rarely have I seen a spectacle so disheartening as the cheerless, trash-strewn one-room flat that serves as the set for the Roundabout Theatre Company's Off-Broadway revival of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger." In this production, reviewed elsewhere in today's Journal, the only hint of beauty comes from the radio on which the play's unhappy characters listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams' radiant Fifth Symphony. Small wonder that it should offer them a glimpse of comfort and joy in the midst of their emotional turmoil. Like so much of Vaughan Williams' music, the Fifth Symphony, which was composed during World War II, is deeply spiritual in tone, and it's no surprise to learn that it was based on themes from his operatic version of "The Pilgrim's Progress."

Here's the surprise: Vaughan Williams was a lifelong agnostic.

Now that the boutique atheism of such aggressive secularists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens has become chic, you might well find yourself wondering why any unbelieving artist would bother to turn his hand to the making of religious art. Indeed, most of the modern novelists who have placed matters of faith at the center of their work have been, like Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, François Mauriac and Flannery O'Connor, believers of one sort or another. But in every other branch of art, great works of devotional art have been created by skeptics, not a few of whom were fire-breathingly militant about their doubt....

How can such folk take up their tools in the name of God--and why would they want to do so? If you're a person of faith, the answer is obvious: They are guided by divine grace, which theologians assure us can be perceived partially or not at all. But there are other explanations....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic in the first movement of Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony:

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Nice guy

In addition to being a great artist, Pat Metheny is also a very nice person. If you work in the arts, you'll know that these two things don't always go hand in hand. Because we both grew up in Missouri, I know that Pat's warm smile and unselfconscious sweetness of character, like the spacious, wide-open sound of his music, are deeply rooted in the friendly place where he was born and raised. It is, sad to say, quite possible for an unfriendly person to make beautiful music, but I like to think that the existence of such sour folk is an insult to the natural order of things. If so, then Pat Metheny makes up for Stan Getz or Benny Goodman.

As I recently mentioned in this space, Pat came to Winter Park the other day to spend some time at Rollins College, my academic home away from home, and he and I made two joint appearances during his brief stay. On Wednesday Chuck Archard and I interviewed him in front of an audience, and on Thursday I moderated a question-and-answer session that followed a concert by Pat and Larry Grenadier, the bassist with whom he's spent the past few months barnstorming all over the world.

Pat flew directly from Japan to Florida on Tuesday. The mere fact that he managed to show up for Wednesday's session was thus more than a little bit astonishing. To say that he was exhausted is an understatement--his eyes were completely bloodshot--and I wouldn't have been at all surprised if he'd cut the evening short. Instead he let it run well into overtime, taking innumerable questions from the audience and answering them with the unfailingly courteous aplomb for which he is legendary among journalists.

I doubt you'll be entirely surprised to learn that not all non-verbal artists are at home in the world of words. I've written profiles of one or two well-known musicians who simply couldn't talk at all, thus forcing me to jump through hoops in order to create the illusion that they had something to say. Fortunately, Pat talks as well as he plays, and "interviewing" him is simply a matter of asking an occasional leading question, then scurrying out of the way. Everything he said on Wednesday was quotable, so much so that I'm planning to transform our chat into one of the Saturday Wall Street Journal's "cultural conversations" at some point in the next month or two. I guarantee that it'll be worth reading, and I can assure you that I won't deserve the least bit of credit for its readability.

Midway through the evening, Pat praised my Louis Armstrong biography in a way that made me blush. I knew that he'd liked Pops, but to hear him say so in public was...well, let's just say that I'll treasure the memory as long as I live. As if that weren't enough of a thrill for one evening, Larry Coryell, Pat's illustrious predecessor in the legendary Gary Burton Quartet, happened to be in the audience on Wednesday. I couldn't believe my eyes when he raised his hand to ask Pat a question about harmony. It was as if William Faulkner were quizzing Flannery O'Connor.

Thursday's performance and post-concert colloquy were, if anything, even more exciting, and Larry turned out to be every bit as articulate as Pat. Mrs. T, who'd never heard Pat other than on record, was transported. Midway through "Change of Heart," she leaned over to me and said, "They're not here, are they? They're in the music." So they were--and so were we.

* * *

Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, and Antonio Sanchez play Metheny's "B & G (Midwestern Night's Dream)":

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

TT: The Eames films (V)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, Powers of Ten, was made in 1968:

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom."

Edward Sapir, Fashion

Posted February 03, 12:00 AM

February 2, 2012

TT: Closing time

The Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel is no more. According to published reports, it will now become "a lounge for Marriott Reward Elite guests." The next time you consider staying at a Marriott hotel, remember who committed that act of cultural vandalism.

I published a tribute to the Oak Room a few years ago in which I summed up how I felt about one of the places that made New York New York. Here's part of it.

* * *

Eighty well-dressed people sit silently in a darkened, oak-paneled room in the center of Manhattan. Some have plates of food in front of them, others have drinks at their elbows, but nobody is paying much attention to food or drink right now, not even the waiters. Instead, they're all listening to a woman seated on a high stool placed in the bend of a piano, her handsome face lit by a single baby spotlight. Her name is Weslia Whitfield, and she's singing a song everyone here knows by heart: Somewhere over the rainbow/Bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow/Why then oh why can't I? It takes a lot of nerve, and a lot of talent, to sing a song like that in a room like this. The woman has both, which is why the crowd is so quiet: you could hear a pin drop across the street.

The song ends, and the crowd cheers--decorously (for this is a decorous room), but nonetheless enthusiastically. As the applause swells and the waiters start stalking through the room once more, Weslia Whitfield grins her crinkly-eyed, I'm-having-fun grin and nods her head in acknowledgment of the hubbub. She knows what she just did: she stopped the show in the Oak Room of New York's Algonquin Hotel. For a cabaret singer, life doesn't get much better than this.

One of the first things I did after I moved to New York City was have dinner at the Algonquin with a group of friends, budding writers all. We sat at a round table in the Rose Room and gazed longingly across the room at another round table--the round table, to be exact. We didn't say anything about it, because we didn't have to; we'd all read the same books in high school and college, and dreamed the same dreams. Instead of pointing and gawking, we swapped wisecracks, pretending they were as clever as the ones George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker fired off right over there. I kept thinking of the scene in the movie Laura in which the beautiful Gene Tierney accosts the waspish Clifton Webb at lunchtime: it was filmed here. No doubt everyone else at our table, if not the whole room, was thinking roughly similar thoughts. The Algonquin does that to you....

The Algonquin Hotel is still doing business at the same old stand, 59 W. 44th St., just about halfway between Broadway and Grand Central Station. Needless to say, the Round Table is no longer in operation, and more than a few of its once-renowned members are long forgotten. (When did Franklin P. Adams' name last cross your mind?) But in a city that prides itself on change, the Algonquin prides itself on not changing, and if Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, or William Shawn were to stroll through the front door tomorrow morning, they'd know just where they were. The lobby still has the comfortable air of a slightly down-at-heel men's club--you ring a brass bell to summon a waiter--and Matilda, the current Algonquin cat, still has free run of the place. Fancy it isn't; classy it most decidedly is.

A very large part of what makes the Algonquin so classy is what goes on in the Oak Room at night. During the day, it's a well-lit place to eat lunch, complete with canned music; after dark, it's New York's most prestigious supper club, the place where every singer in America who prefers Cole Porter to MTV Unplugged dreams of working. Back in 1939, Frank Case, who ran the hotel throughout its Round Table days, turned the Oak Room into a nightclub whose regular patrons included the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, and Hedy Lamarr. But World War II put an end to cabaret at the Algonquin, and it wasn't until 1981 that the Oak Room again became a venue for American popular song. The singer-pianist Steve Ross, hired on a trial basis, stayed there for four years, and the Algonquin has been presenting cabaret acts ever since....

What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the eighty-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. "It's nice singing in a room this small," Whitfield says, "because I get feedback from the people. I know what works--and what doesn't work. When they're bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it's very slow, and very limited."

But the Oak Room's not-so-secret ingredient, irreproducible at any price, is the fact that it is part and parcel of the Algonquin Hotel. "Lots of famous people slept at the Waldorf," an old Algonquin hand says sniffishly, "but nobody did anything there." Well, plenty of people did things at the Algonquin, and not just the members of the Round Table, either. William Faulkner wrote his Nobel Prize acceptance speech there; the New Yorker was practically invented there. Sinclair Lewis actually offered to buy the place. Everybody who sings in the Oak Room knows it isn't just another club: it's a piece of history. "There are ghosts here," says Weslia Whitfield. "But good ghosts. They want you to do well."

It struck me the other day that America had finally realized Karl Marx's dream of a classless society: nobody here has any class. But in the Oak Room, all the men wear ties and--at least when the music is playing--all the women look like Gene Tierney, cool and chiselled and enigmatic, thinking their private thoughts as Weslia Whitfield lifts her silvery voice in song. Gangsta rap and grunge rock may rule the airwaves, but in this dark, quiet room, Harold Arlen still prospers. Alec Wilder, another great American songwriter (and longtime Algonquin resident), planned at one time to write a book about the Algonquin Hotel called The Elegant Refuge. Though the book never got written, the title was a perfect fit, and still is. For the middle-aged, the Oak Room is a blessed refuge from the squalor of the present; for the young, it is the classroom in which they learn the lost language of elegance. Long may it reign.

Posted February 02, 5:08 PM

TT: Roll away the stone

I rarely suffer from writer's block, but I've been stymied for weeks and weeks by the opening of the fifth chapter of Mood Indigo, my Duke Ellington biography. I'm sure that the underlying reason for my paralysis was the unusually high level of distraction in my life, but I found it so hard to get going that I actually became near-phobic about it.

Yesterday I finally broke through the ice and wrote the following words:

Hollywood has always had an equivocal relationship with jazz. Once upon a time, the presence of a saxophone on the soundtrack of a Hollywood film was a signpost pointing to unbridled sexuality. Nowadays it indicates world-weary sophistication. But no matter what signals the sound of jazz is meant to send, the making and makers of jazz have usually been romanticized when they are portrayed in movies (just as the music itself is softened). Nor has the American film industry ever been at ease in putting black musicians on the screen in anything other than the most stereotypical of roles--when it allows them to appear at all. The supremely photogenic Louis Armstrong was customarily relegated to such roles, so much so that he once played a character who was referred to on screen as "Uncle Tom." Even though the first feature-length talking picture was called The Jazz Singer, it was not until 1929 that black jazz musicians of importance appeared on the silver screen. Moreover, the films in question were shot in Manhattan, not Hollywood, and they were directed not by an old studio hand but by an avant-garde filmmaker.

And...I'm off!

* * *

Excerpts from Black and Tan, a 1929 short directed by Dudley Murphy and starring Duke Ellington and Fredi Washington:

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

TT: The Eames films (IV)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, The Information Machine, was made in 1958:

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, 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)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, 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)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, remounting of Broadway production, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SANTA MONICA:
• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, suitable for mature children, closes Feb. 12, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CORAL GABLES, FLA.:
• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Sorrow ends not when it seemeth done."

William Shakespeare, Richard II

Posted February 02, 12:00 AM

February 1, 2012

TT: Man at work (sort of)

This is my desk in Winter Park, Florida:

You will note that I'm taking pictures of it rather than sitting at it.

Posted February 01, 11:39 AM

THE PRODUCER

Posted February 01, 11:19 AM

TT: In the beginning

This story appeared in the New Orleans Times-Democrat on January 2, 1913. It was reproduced in the Times-Picayune the other day. Here's how I described it in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

The law of unintended consequences was working overtime when Louis pried open his mother's cedar chest, stole a revolver belonging to one of his "stepfathers," loaded it with blanks, and took it along with him on his nightly tour of the red-light district. It was the last day of 1912, and the city was in its customary New Year's Eve hubbub. As Louis and his quartet strolled up Rampart Street, another boy from the neighborhood started "shooting" at them with a cap pistol. Louis promptly pulled his .38 out of his belt and fired back. All at once a policeman came up behind him and wrapped his arms around the boy. "Oh Mister, let me alone!" he cried. "Don't take the pistol! I won't do it no more!" He spent the night in a cell and went before a juvenile-court judge the next morning. What followed, unlike his birth eleven years before, was deemed worthy of coverage by the local papers: "Very few arrests of minors were made Tuesday, and the bookings in the Juvenile Court are not more than the average....The most serious case was that of Louis Armstrong, a twelve-year-old negro, who discharged a revolver at Rampart and Perdido Streets. Being an old offender he was sent to the negro Waif's Home." The old offender was hauled away in a horse-drawn wagon, scared and unsure. All unknowing, he had come to the turning point of his life.

The clip marks the very first time that Louis Armstrong's name appeared in print anywhere. Alas, all I had in hand was a fuzzy photocopy that was too dim to reproduce in Pops. How I wish that I could have included it in my book! Rarely has so great a man made so inauspicious a debut.

Posted February 01, 10:54 AM

TT: The Eames films (III)

This week I'm posting five films made by Charles and Ray Eames. Today's installment, Toccata for Toy Trains, was made in 1957. The narration is by Charles Eames and the score is by Elmer Bernstein:

Posted February 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Dame Rebecca West talks to William F. Buckley, Jr., on Firing Line in 1968:

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

Posted February 01, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

Posted February 01, 12:00 AM