Archives for May 2012

The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week with which to report from California on South Coast Repertory’s revival of August Wilson’s Jitney. Here’s an excerpt.
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Has there been an American playwright who was better than August Wilson at turning the everyday speech of ordinary people into poetry? Maybe Clifford Odets, but I’d be hard pressed to name another rival. Scarcely a page of “Jitney,” the first installment of Mr. Wilson’s 10-play cycle about the black experience in America, goes by without at least a line or two that sets the air to dancing. One of the glories of South Coast Repertory’s distinguished revival is that each member of the cast is fully, excitingly alive to the play’s verbal music. For all its beauties, “Jitney” is not the most soundly made of Mr. Wilson’s scripts, but in this staging, directed with unobtrusive but uncommon finesse by Ron OJ Parson, its flaws are rendered irrelevant by the sheer quality of the performance.
“Jitney” is set in 1977, five years before the play received its premiere. The scene is the rundown station of a gypsy-cab company in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Becker (Charlie Robinson), who runs the station, is a world-weary man of a certain age who has just received a pair of bitter blows. Not only has he learned that the city is about to tear down the decaying building that houses the station, but Booster (Montae Russell), his son, who went to prison 20 years ago for killing a woman, has served out his term and come back to Pittsburgh. Booster’s unwelcome presence will trigger a confrontation with his father in which the price of pride is dramatized with a force that is worthy of Shakespeare–or Sophocles.
The first act of “Jitney” is a perfect piece of theatrical carpentry that may well be the best thing Mr. Wilson ever wrote. The climactic showdown between Becker and his son has an operatic thrust and weight, and even the most casual of conversations elswehere in the play ring with the sound of life itself….
Not only is Mr. Parson’s staging as earthy and right as a 12-bar blues, but Shaun Motley’s sad, shabby set and Vincent Olivieri’s precisely calculated sound design supply the frame for a winningly fine display of ensemble acting by the entire nine-person cast, led with unimpeachable realism by Mr. Robinson….
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Read the whole thing here.

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, reviewed here)

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Columnist (drama, PG-13/R, closes July 1, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

• 4000 Miles (drama, PG-13, closes July 1, reviewed here)

• Man and Superman (serious comedy, G, far too long and complex for children of any age, extended through July 1, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, closes June 24, original run reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, closes June 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:

• Timon of Athens (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes June 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, transfer of Kennedy Center/Broadway revival, closes June 9, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Death of a Salesman (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO:

• Endgame/Play (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”
Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason

A great American artist has left us. Oh, how he will be missed:

George Bernard Shaw prepared numerous color-coded pre-printed postcards with which he endeavored to stay on top of his vast incoming correspondence. Many of them survive, but none, so far as I know, have been reproduced in Shaw’s biographies. I thought it might amuse you to see four of them.
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Over the weekend I got an e-mail from my oldest friend:

Middle age is a bittersweet time. As we finally mature enough to appreciate the people in our lives, we find that we have to start saying goodbye to some of them and discover that we may not have used to its fullest the time we were given with them. My parents are old enough that every time I see them may very well be the last time, so I try to savor those times. I have reserved a fishing guide for the end of June to take my dad and my boys fishing for big stripers. He took me fishing nearly every day in the summer of my young age, but we haven’t fished together since I was probably ten years old.

How I envy him–and I don’t even like to fish. My friend is a wise man.
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Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong sing “Gone Fishin'”:

David Oistrakh and Frieda Bauer play Debussy’s G Minor Violin Sonata:

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

“If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason.”
Mort Sahl, Live at the hungry i

Mrs. T and I, having spent a week in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Big Sur, departed Ragged Point Inn last Tuesday and resumed our travels down Highway 1. On Saturday we reached San Diego, dropped our bags at the hotel, and saw a double bill of plays by Harold Pinter that same night. In between…well, we kept busy.
A few miles south of Ragged Point, we pulled off the road and spent a few delightful minutes communing with the occupants of the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery, whose website contains an admirably straightforward description of its unique attractions:

The Northern Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris, is an extraordinary marine mammal. It spends eight to ten months a year in the open ocean, diving 1000 to 5000 feet deep for periods of fifteen minutes to two hours, and migrating thousands of miles, twice a year, to its land based rookery for birthing, breeding, molting and rest. The Piedras Blancas rookery, on Highway 1 seven miles north of San Simeon on the California Central Coast, is home to about 17,000 animals.

Mrs. T, who goes in for such spectacles, was thrilled beyond words, and I confess to finding the whole thing pretty amazing myself.
We spent our first two nights on the road in Santa Barbara, where we ate to glorious excess at La Super-Rica (pictured above), and Costa Mesa, where we caught a performance of August Wilson’s Jitney that I’ll be reviewing later this week. On Thursday we drove to Hollywood, pausing in Newport Beach to take in the Orange County Museum of Art’s retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings. I’ve long been an ardent admirer of Diebenkorn’s work, so much so that I bought one of his etchings a few years ago, but it wasn’t until I visited Santa Fe for the first time in 2008 that I came to appreciate how intimately his “abstract” paintings, above all the “Ocean Park” series, reflect the natural landscapes that he knew and loved.
The bad news is that the exhibition closed on Saturday. The good news is that it’s moving to the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, where it will be on display from June 30 to September 23. I beg you to go, no matter how far you have to travel. It’s one of the half-dozen best museum shows devoted to an American artist that I’ve seen in my life.
Our next stop was the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the site of the first Academy Awards ceremony, which was spruced up to the max in 2005 but whose public areas still exude a pleasingly old-fashioned air. The Roosevelt is across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which I’d always wanted to see but never got around to visiting until now. In addition to being a tourist trap par excellence, Grauman’s is a testament to the transitory nature of fame, enshrining as it does the hand- and footprints of golden-age movie stars, many of whom continue to be vividly remembered but a fair number of whom are forgotten save by fanatics. (Bet you don’t know who Jean Hersholt was.) I was pleased that the stones of Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton are side by side, and amused to see that Sid Grauman found places of honor for Lauritz Melchior and Ezio Pinza, both of whom are rather better known for their achievements in another sphere.
We stopped in Hollywood not to see plays but to pull ourselves together after two nonstop weeks of grief, mourning, and frenzied travel (and, as always, so that I could get some writing done). The only “show” we saw there was Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, which we watched with pleasure in our hotel room.
To be sure, I was also supposed to have had lunch in Los Angeles with Morten Lauridsen, about whom I’ve written but whom I have yet to meet. Alas, he got snagged by a jury-duty summons, so I settled for sleeping in, drafting a Wall Street Journal column, and dining en famille with Mrs. T and an ex-protégé who has since metamorphosed into a good friend. On Saturday we brunched with another old friend, then headed south.
On Sunday afternoon we went to Itamar Moses’ new show, which I’ll be writing about for the Journal later today. Tonight we drive to La Jolla to see Hands on a Hardbody, about which I’ve heard much, nearly all of it good. Come Wednesday we fly back to New York, and on Friday I hit the road again, this time on my own. My destination will be Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Shaw Festival, where I’m seeing Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears, and Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance.
If all this sounds a bit excessive, you’re right, and then some. The only thing that’s keeping me from keeling over is the knowledge that I’ll be reporting to the MacDowell Colony on June 18 for five weeks of near-solitary work in the woods of New Hampshire. I long with all my heart to be shown to my studio and left to my own devices, but I can’t quite imagine what it will feel like to spend five weeks working on my Duke Ellington biography without having to see a show or hit a deadline, much less to spend my days unable to surf the web (the MacDowell studios are wireless-free zones). Perhaps I’ll go mad, though somehow I doubt it.
Either way, I have to get through the next three weeks first, not to mention the next two days. Another show and a transcontinental flight stand between me and New York. Yes, life on the road is fun (up to a point, Lord Copper!). Yes, you can have too much fun. Have I had it? Not quite yet–but just about.
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John Barrymore imprints his profile at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1940:

The Piedras Blancas LiveCam:

Video streaming by Ustream

From 2005:

I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short–and so often shorter than we expect–that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene….

Read the whole thing here.