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About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, November 3, 2006
TT: Time out
I'm burned out—too much travel, too much writing, too many shows. On Tuesday I leave for Washington, D.C., to spend three days in conference with the other members of the National Council on the Arts, and once I get back I'll be seeing four plays in a row.
All this suggests that it's time for a break from blogging. I'll post the daily almanac entry, Thursday's theater guide, and Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column and "Sightings" teasers, but otherwise I'm taking next week off. Our Girl will post if she feels like it. If not, not.
Later.
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TT: How wonderful a sound can be
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on two of the shows I saw last weekend in Portland and Seattle, Portland Center Stage’s West Side Story and Intiman Theatre’s Native Son:
Even for a solidly established regional company like Portland Center Stage, “West Side Story” is a stretch, and I expected to see an ambitious but not wholly successful production about which I’d have felt honor-bound to write a tactful, encouraging review. Well, guess what? This “West Side Story” needs no apologies of any kind. Among other things, it’s the best-sung revival of a musical that I’ve ever seen, whether on or off Broadway.
Strong words, I know, but all the leads have splendid voices and compelling personalities, especially Carey Brown, who sings well enough to remind me of Kristin Chenoweth….
Intiman Theatre has done itself proud with “Native Son,” Kent Gash’s new dramatic adaptation of Richard Wright’s still-shocking 1940 novel about a young black man from Chicago who lays belated claim to his ravaged manhood through the act of murder. Few great novels have been put on stage without losing their souls along the way, but Mr. Gash, who doubles as director of this production, has wisely stuck close to Wright’s original text, cunningly shaping it into a Brecht-like chronicle play whose occasional moments of narrative stiffness do nothing to diminish its slashing intensity….
No free link. To read the whole thing, go out and buy a copy of today’s morning's Journal, then turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, plus a plethora of other good pieces. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
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TT: Almanac
"Flies, bees and buttterflies flew in through the open window. The flies and bees settled on some spilled sugar. A butterfly hovered over a slice of bread. It didn't eat, but seemed to savor the odor. To Herman these were not parasites to be driven away; he saw in each of these creatures the manifestations of the eternal will to live, experience, comprehend. As the fly's antennae stretched out toward the food, it rubbed its hind legs together. The wings of the butterfly reminded Herman of a prayer shawl. The bee hummed and buzzed and flew out again. A small ant crawled about. It had survived the cold night and was creeping across the table—but where to? It paused at a crumb, then continued on, zigzagging back and forth. It had separated itself from the anthill and now had to make out on its own."
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story
| Thursday, November 2, 2006
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal or on “About Last Night” when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Dec. 17)
• Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
• The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)
OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
• Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"Political thinking has become so distorted and corrupted during this long, long half century that one has to begin by tearing it out, roots and all, from one's soil to prepare the ground for a healthy and humane politics that fosters the virtu of the free citizen."
Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)
| Wednesday, November 1, 2006
TT: Pit stop
(1) I updated the Top Five and "Teachout in Commentary" modules in between deadlines today. Check out the right-hand column and you'll find lots of interesting new stuff.
(2) I agree with everything Our Girl says immediately below about Rachel Ries. She is the real deal.
Now, back to work!
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 1, 2006 | Permanent
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OGIC: Close quarters
The other day Peter Suderman wrote here about the rare thrill of seeing pop music giant Beck perform in a tiny DC club.
For those of you outside the music nerd sphere, it's the musical the equivalent of going to a local sports bar and watching a game with President Bush. It's like having Conan O'Brian do a show from your living room. It's like meeting up with Quentin Tarantino to watch Death Wish on a 27" TV.
And it's exactly how live rock music should be seen.
For all the trippy, awesome excess of stadium and large venue rock shows, I've never been all that impressed with them. You drop a wad of cash to listen to overprocessed, might-as-well-be-CD music while standing a quarter-mile away in a crowd of zillions. Live music isn't just about hanging out and hearing music-you can do that at a bar with a DJ any night of the week. It's about getting a sense of the musician, about being close to them, watching how they interact with both the crowd and with their music.
Having been in active avoidance of stadium shows since college, I couldn't agree more. And it just so happens that I recently had an experience along the lines of Peter's that I've been meaning to write about it; his post is the perfect occasion to finally do so.
If you've been paying attention to our Top Five in the right-hand column of this page, you may remember my recent blurb on the album of a Chicago singer-songwriter, Rachel Ries. My friend David and I happened upon Ries last year when she opened for Erin McKeown at Schuba's. Knowing nothing about Ries at the time, and running low batting averages when it came to unknown opening acts, we prudently approached her set with low expectations. The fact that she came out hoarse and apologetic—she was getting over a cold—didn't do very much to heighten them. But the moment she started singing, we were both taken.
There's a rawly emotional, yearning quality to Ries's voice that made her slight hoarseness on this occasion a plus, adding another dimension of vulnerability. The stripping away of a layer of polish, somewhat like the intimacy of the setting in which Peter saw Beck, served to make us feel closer to the artist. And it lent itself particularly well to the kind of music Ries makes. When I wrote about her album "For You Only" for the Top Five, I may have come off as confused because I wanted to give short shrift to neither the emotional immediacy of her singing nor its artfulness. It's the former that's most striking and affecting, but the latter, certainly, that's responsible for these effects. The vulnerability attaches to both the songs about joy (in which sweetness and erotic charge are so enmeshed as to become practically synonymous) and the songs about pain (in which, refreshingly, the narrators are as likely to be the stories' villains as their protagonists).
This September David and I went out to Oak Park to see Ries perform as half of a two-person show held in the living room of this local music blogger and his family. It was the most intimate musical performance I'd ever attended, and especially powerful because I'd finally acquired Ries's CD only a few weeks earlier and had spent those few weeks playing it on a continual loop—washing dishes, working out, driving, getting ready for work in the morning. I'm like that with new musical crushes; I want that music burned into my brain and typically don't rest, or listen to anything else, until it's effectively recorded there. By the time of the Oak Park concert, I was still high on discovery and knew half the tracks backward and forward.
So this autumnal September evening in the suburbs was a rare delight: not only did I get to cap my three-week captivation with Ries's songs and singing by witnessing her live performance, but she was playing only a few yards away from where I sat comfortably couched, glass of wine in hand, surrounded by amiable strangers. Ries was sharing the stage with her friend and frequent collaborator Anais Mitchell, to whom this show was my happy introduction, the pair taking turns performing. Between sets I even chatted with (perhaps gushed to) Rachel, who received all my praise with exemplary grace. During the second set she even played my request, the brilliant and brutal song "Unkind," which is like a short story whittled down to its essential contours but still suggesting a world of texture and detail.
For those of you in Chicago, Rachel Ries performs this Friday night at the California Clipper—not quite someone's living room, but intimate enough to promise another memorable show. Her email announcement paints the bar as a kind of home away from home for her:
This Friday I can be found at my favoritest bar of all time, the California Clipper. As I can often & on any given night be found there, it's nearly business as usual. However, I've never played their stage so therein lies a vast difference: on Friday I'll be dressed up and singing into a mic as opposed to dressed scrappy and humming at the bar whilst losing at Scrabble.
So come out Friday night and have your socks charmed off (by songs like "You Only") and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end (by songs like "Unkind"). I'll be the rapt one in the burnt orange velvet scarf—be sure to say hello.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 1, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"Many of our intellectual civilization's problems, our intellectual problems, arise because people do not read aloud. An enormous percentage of literature would simply vanish if the authors had to read their works aloud, only aloud. They would be ashamed; the falsehood would be obvious. When people read only with their eyes, all the falsehood can enter imperceptibly even the most critical eye. The mouth is for speaking the truth or lies, whereas the eyes are really esthetic. The eyes see whether something is beautiful or ugly, useful or useless."
Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 1, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, October 31, 2006
OGIC: Where's OGIC?
For the last two weeks, sick as a dog and huddled hermitlike in my bed. Before that, there was a truly fabulous and entirely computer-free Vegas junket plus the requisite week to prepare and week to recover. Add it all up, and you have one absurdly long absence from this blog, for which I apologize.
Though I'm now on the mend and making public appearances, i.e., at my workplace, I'm not completely recovered. From time to time the coughing up of a lung still seems imminent, and I'm still on my delightful but soporific cough medicine, which seems to come down to an expectorant heavily cut with vicodin. (Which reminds me: new episodes of House return tomorrow, so set your DVRs.) Since the possibility of a secondary pneumonia was raised by my doctor, I'm playing this one conservatively. I'll be posting this week, but in all likelihood my contributions will be brief and few as I aim for early bedtimes and a reclining rather than upright posture whenever possible. Still and all, it's nice to be back.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, October 31, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"As of now at least, more good people are to be encountered in America than in Europe. Theirs is, however, a somewhat coarse and seemingly careless goodness because there is a low level of psychological intensity in human exchanges here, both of the good and the bad."
Czeslaw Milosz, foreword to Aleksander Wat, My Century
| Monday, October 30, 2006
TT: West Coast story
I'm writing from Seattle on Sunday night, having finally come to the end of a long, hectic weekend of theater-related travel and adventures.
On Thursday I flew to Portland, Oregon, where my traveling companion and I picked up a rental car, headed for Hayden Island, and there took up residence on a yacht. That makes our accommodations sound a bit fancier than they really were: the Grand Ronde Place, the yacht-and-breakfast where I spent my two nights in Portland, is a thirty-four-foot sailboat whose interior is comparable in size to a motor home. The "stateroom," not surprisingly, was a bit on the snug side, but I'd always wanted to sleep on a boat, the owner-host was wonderfully considerate, and all in all we couldn't have been happier. Should you find yourself in Portland and feel like staying somewhere out of the ordinary, I recommend the Grand Ronde Place very enthusiastically.
On Friday morning we drove south to the Gordon House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in the Pacific Northwest that's open to the public. Designed in 1957 and built seven years later, it's a two-story Usonian house that came within weeks of being torn down when a Philistine with too much money bought the lot on which it stood and decided that he'd prefer living in a McMansion. Thanks to a last-minute rescue effort by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, the house was dismantled in 2000 and moved twenty-four miles to the Oregon Garden, where it can now be viewed by interested visitors. We spent an hour and a half touring the house and grounds, and—as always—I came away wishing I could live in so perfectly conceived and executed a building. In the evening we saw Portland Center Stage's production of West Side Story, performed in the company's brand-new Gerding Theater, a 599-seat proscenium-stage house located in what used to be the Portland Armory.
At noon on Saturday we took the Amtrak Cascades to Seattle, an afternoon-long train trip through Oregon and Washington that left us with just enough time to dine on crabcakes at the Dahlia Lounge. Sunday, by contrast, was a triple-header: brunch with Mr. Rifftides, a matinée performance of Native Son at Intiman Theatre, and an evening performance of Steve Martin's The Underpants at ACT Theatre.
I'm in transit all day Monday, at the end of which I'll reclaim the Teachout Museum from Ms. in the wings, who's been housesitting for me. (She flew to New York from San Francisco last week to give a couple of concerts, staying at my apartment while I was on the West Coast.) I'll be spending Tuesday and Wednesday hitting a pair of deadlines, opening my mail, and recovering from the events of the past few days. Our Girl, who's been under the weather, will post if she feels up to it, but don't expect to hear from me again until Thursday.
Have a nice week!
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TT: Almanac
"The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, October 30, 2006 | Permanent
link | Friday, October 28, 2005
OGIC: The vanishing
So where have I been?
In no particular order: at the office, watching baseball in bars, at the godforsaken Bears-Ravens game in the cold stubborn rain (mitigating factors: disenchanted traveling Baltimore fans in the next row coldly assessing the state of the game, viz., "This is like watching the Ravens play the Ravens"; national anthem performed by Styx), subsequently in bed for the better part of a day, to the airport to pick up a friend who stayed here for several days, at the movies seeing something wicked this way hop, watching the 8-1 Red Wings at a kind friend's house when they were on OLN, watching the 9-1 Red Wings here when they were on local television (all leading up to watching the 10-1 Red Wings in the flesh this Saturday at the United Center, whee!), eating out at the Twisted Spoke, Lula Cafe, and the Original Pancake House, getting my hair cut, to Best Buy to purchase a Tivo, back to Best Buy the next week to enable a friend to do the same…and, far, far too much of the time, messing around in the Puzzle Boat (thank you, Eric. I think). Whew.
More relevantly to the concerns of this blog, I popped my head in at the Lit Blog Co-op today, in the comments, to join Golden Rule Jones and C. Max McGee in their enlightening discussion of Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (which you really should read). I may have a review essay in print this weekend, in which case I'll post a link. And in the coming days, I hope to ease myself back into regular blogging again. Until soon.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, October 28, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: In the bud
A friend writes:
It was only in the last few years I developed the spine to stop
reading a book if I don't like it. Now I even throw one in the trash
if I really hate it. The one from which I most recently defected was
"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard, and I feel guilty because so many
classy people like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me.
Alas, I have no opinion of Shirley Hazzard (sorry, OGIC), but I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. Nor have I ever had a problem with doing so, though it may have more to do with my being a professional journalist than having a well-developed spine. Journalists, after all, are chronic skippers and skimmers. We have to be, since we spend much of our working lives “getting up” subjects about which we too often know little or nothing prior to being assigned to write about them. I’ve reached the point in my career where I pick most of my own subjects, but back when I wasn’t in a position to be so choosy, I was more than willing to say yes to any assignment, however arcane. I learned to simulate the appearance of knowledge—this is what is meant by the well-known saying that a journalist’s mind is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep—and one of the ways I did it was by learning how to strain the gist out of a book without reading it from cover to cover.
It stands to reason that Dr. Johnson, one of the all-time great skippers, should have spoken the last word on those who insist on “reading books through”:
This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?
Except for my correspondent, the only person I can think of who has had such a problem was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Justice Holmes was constitutionally incapable of putting down an unfinished book until he reached extreme old age and finally came to his senses. But, then, Justice Holmes was a prime specimen of that queerest and least comprehensible of breeds, the secular puritan. As Edmund Wilson explains in Patriotic Gore:
His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining—this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind—that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn’t.
I greatly admire Holmes, but I love Dr. Johnson, and this is one of the reasons why. He had what he called “a bottom of good sense,” and for all his extreme peculiarities, it rarely let him down. Whatever the subject, you can usually count on him to cut through the posturing and get to the point. I, too, take it for granted that God has better things to do than inquire as to my reading habits—though He may well want a word with me about one or two books that I reviewed in my incautious youth without first having read them from cover to cover!
These lapses notwithstanding, I'd say Dr. Johnson hit it on the nose. 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. So if you really want me to read each and every page of your thousand-page biography of Millard Fillmore, send me a check. I have my price.
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TT: The continuing crunch
If you're wondering why I haven't answered any of your e-mails in recent days, the answer is that I'm swamped and floundering. Too much work, not enough time, arrgh, yikes.
Stand by. It may take another day or two, but this, too, shall pass.
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TT: The re-Producers
Today is Friday, meaning that this morning’s Wall Street Journal contains my weekly drama column. I wrote about three shows, two on Broadway and one near it: Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, Wendy Wasserstein’s Third, and Rick Najera’s Latinologues. In all three cases, my feelings were mixed:
Instead of Oscar, the slovenly sportswriter, [Nathan] Lane should have played the maddeningly fussy Felix—and I bet he knows it, too. Maybe that’s why he spends the first act channeling Groucho Marx. Not until after intermission does he find his own path into the part, and even then you keep thinking about how Walter Matthau read the same lines in the movie….
Were Mr. Simon’s insert-flap-A-in-slot-B jokes ever funny? I remember chortling at them as a boy, but now they mostly leave me cold. In fact, the whole first act of “The Odd Couple” feels less like a comedy than a set of instructions for making an audience laugh....
Wendy Wasserstein, who has been absent from the New York stage for the past few years, has returned with “Third,” now playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. I wish it were good. I wanted it to be. Ms. Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles,” is one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect. But “Third” is neither memorable nor convincing in its portrayal of a radical feminist beset by midlife doubts. Instead, it’s sentimental to a fault—and false at its squishy-soft core….
Why is it that most ethnic humor, were it to be spoken out loud and in public by someone not of the ethnic group in question, would be considered a hate crime? In Rick Najera’s “Latinologues,” an evening of standup comedy monologues spliced together to simulate a four-person play, every Latino-related cliché I’ve ever heard is trotted out and served up as gospel truth…
No link, naturally. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism’s best bargain.
P.S. "Sightings," my biweekly Journal column about the arts in America, will be in the "Pursuits" section of tomorrow's paper. Check it out.
UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to today’s drama column. Go here to read the whole thing.
Mr. Something Old, Nothing New thinks the Odd Couple TV series was superior to the play, and explains why—persuasively. (Most of the comedy professionals I know agree with this assessment, by the way.)
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TT: Rerun
October 2003:
As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines—if not most—rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were "self-checked," a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all—it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Advance paid in 1973 to Stephen King by Doubleday for Carrie: $2,500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $11,038.50
(Source: Stephen King, On Writing)
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TT: Almanac
"To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. This is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us."
Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography
| Thursday, October 27, 2005
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
• Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
• Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)
• The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• The Caterers (drama, R, violence, strong language, explicit sexual situations, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
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TT: Number, please
• Royalty paid in 1940 to Aaron Copland for each performance of his score for the Eugene Loring ballet Billy the Kid: $40
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $532.28
(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)
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TT: Almanac
"Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
| Wednesday, October 26, 2005
TT: Elsewhere
Recent reading, randomly arranged:
• Here, at last, is the rest of the story about the German edition of Deidre Bair’s biography of Carl Jung:
Random House has ended a literary dispute over a biography of Carl Gustav Jung by publishing a new version this month in Germany without special annotations and material from the Swiss heirs who had complained about "factual errors" and "misleading" information about the psychiatrist.
The biography by Deirdre Bair, which was published earlier in the United States, has been the subject of a struggle between the author and some members of Jung's family who disputed many facts in the book…
Fearing a potential lawsuit, Random House in Germany decided to insert two pages of the Jung family's version of descriptions and facts in the book, which one of its imprints, Knaus Verlag, planned to publish this month. But last week the book appeared in German bookstores without the family's material….
Good.
• Mr. Outer Life identifies an important cultural phenomenon:
So it was with some surprise a few weeks ago that I recognized a celebrity in my daughter’s classroom. We were there for back-to-school night and he walked in late, causing every head to turn. As the heads turned back and the room erupted in silent whispers of “Is that him?,” I knew it was, for he starred in a sitcom I’d watched when I was a kid and his well-preserved face had denied and defied the intervening decades.
As soon as the teacher stopped talking the celeb made a beeline for the door, leaving the rest of us to mill about and speak of his presence in awed, hushed tones. Apparently he’s not a washed-up has-been, fodder for “Where Are They Now?” features. No, he’s still a real celebrity, starring on a hit TV show and living with his beautiful wife and beautiful children in a beautiful house in the most beautiful part of town.
As they talked, I detected celebrity validation in the air, that peace of mind we get when a celebrity endorses us by doing what we do….
• Ms. Pratie Place’s daughter/co-blogger, who lives in Manhattan, puts her finger on a mystery:
I was at boyfriend's house the other day (parents' house, in the suburbs) and I went down to get something the basement. And just as I hit the bottom of the stairs, I got the oddest feeling. I felt—not quite sick—but just very strange. And what I realized it was, was, silence. There was no traffic, no office, no TV. There was no noise. My ears were ringing with silence. And it was good, but I didn't feel quite as good as you might think….
I never sleep well the first night I’m back in Smalltown, U.S.A., on a visit. It’s too quiet.
• Excellent green-room advice from Mr. Think Denk:
I just finished this last weekend playing the Franck Quintet for piano and strings, a piece which apparently many people have trouble taking seriously. Last season I played this work at the end of a tour in Sayville or Islip (I don't quite remember) and a man afterwards said some very unkind things about the piece, in a tone of voice I cannot forgive. This kind of dismissiveness I find very upsetting. Suddenly it seemed to me the five of us had driven out in the rain in a rental car, very tired, had nearly gotten lost in Long Island, and had worked hard in an unpleasant-sounding hall to bring the piece across, and some jerk had to mouth off...I worked myself into an inner rage about this, and came as close as I ever had to yelling at someone backstage. The Franck Quintet is, anyway, the Franck Quintet; either you "buy it" or you don't. And if you don't buy it, don't take it out on the musicians...
As it happens, I used not to buy it—but now I do. (For what it's worth, the older I get, the more music I like.)
• Mr. Something Old, Nothing New remembers the late Charles Rocket, who cut his throat the other day:
His best-known TV guest appearance was probably as Bruce Willis's brother in the second season premiere of "Moonlighting," competing with Willis for the attentions of Cybill Shepherd. He was a failed con man who started the episode by trying to plug the ultimate miracle product, "Rich 'n Thin," by doing the first and (deliberately) worst rap number by a white guy in prime-time TV….
Not only do I remember that episode, but until a few years ago, God help me, I could have recited most of the lyrics from memory. Strange how cluttered a middle-aged head gets….
• Ms. Household Opera asks (and answers) a wonderful question:
Which movie scenes always make you cry (and which ones always make you laugh)?
I’m not in the mood to generate original content today, but suffice it to say that our lists overlap.
• Says Mr. From the Floor:
Today, one doesn’t even need to have basic technical skills to publish a website. There is only one barrier to entry remaining for someone who wants to become a voice in the culture at large: the ability to think and write clearly. Granted, that’s still a large barrier, but there have always been more people interested in being journalists and critics than there have been publications to support them. Today one doesn’t need the backing of a major publication to develop a voice and establish a dedicated readership.
Today the editorial, printing, and distribution functions have almost no impact on how a writer develops credibility and reaches an audience of readers. Readers are rapidly migrating away from pay-for-use information services (in print or on the web) and turning to free sites hosted by print publications and to other information providers (like bloggers) for current cultural content. Researchers are becoming more reliant on search engine results for information and less reliant on proprietary systems and pay-for-use archives. By hiding their writers behind a curtain that readers must pay to open, mainstream publications are diluting their historical roles in the culture as conveyors of information and tastemakers….
Yes I said yes I will yes. The problem, alas, is that my bosses at The Wall Street Journal (unlike nearly everybody else in the newspaper business) turn a tidy profit by making the Journal’s contents available on a subscription-only basis. I wish I could link to the stuff I write for them—but I’m awfully fond of earning a living, too. A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox!
• Rich food for thought from Mr. Superfluities:
I can only go by the evidence of my own experience, small and insignificant in the larger scheme as that is. But it is this: that art, so far from engaging the world, should provide the means by which we are encouraged to transcend it. Turning from the ridiculous to the sublime, it is this which differentiates works like, say, Tristan, the canvases of Mark Rothko and the music of Morton Feldman from works like Angels in America, the canvases of Rauschenberg and the music of—oh, I don't know, everybody from Eminem to Kander & Ebb. As Kant will happily tell you, there's no escaping the boundaries of human sensual experience, but as Schopenhauer will whisper in your ear, you can always seek to transcend it through renunciation of the world and through the highest expressions of sensuality itself. Art and religion provide the means for that renunciation….
• Er, this is my life.
And by the way, Ms. A, thanks for the plug:
Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?
Political: Instapundit. Nonpolitical: About Last Night.
We always scroll down.
• Oh, yes, Lileks has been peeking, too:
Me, I love lunch. So little hangs on lunch; your expectations are low and easily met. So it’s hard to be pleased by however it goes. Some people like variety; others have the same thing every day because they can, and because it’s the one meal where a family man really has complete control. Breakfast might be drawn from the shifting stores of cereal and fruit; dinner is variable by law, because we’d all rebel if the same thing was served each night. Even the single man objects. The single man in his lowest state rotates between fast-food outlets, because even the dullest example of the genre knows there is something inexcusable about eating McDonald’s every night....
As for me, all I can say is that if I didn't live two blocks away from Good Enough to Eat, I'd be reduced within days to the most desperate and pitiful of singletonian culinary extremities—sort of like one of Barbara Pym's characters, only male, if you know what I mean.
• No matter what you do for a living, this is harder.
• Says Mr. CultureSpace:
I don't know how accurate Capote is, and, to a certain extent, it doesn't matter. A film, I have always believed, must work within its own parameters; its faithfulness to its source material is secondary, if it matters at all….
O.K., I take the point—but what if the “source material” is the historical record? Does it “matter” if an artfully made docudrama contains significant distortions that large numbers of ordinary folk come to regard as the whole truth and nothing but?
Just asking.
• San Francisco’s de Young Museum has moved to a new building. My favorite blogger offers a characteristic report on the change of venue:
The northwest corner of the new de Young Museum twists skyward, as if it's been pinched between an oversized thumb and forefinger and given a good tug. Maybe Jack's giant wanted the museum back but (wary of the San Franciscan) decided against it and let go. And so the tower remains, with nowhere to hide and with a mesh-like copper exterior that simultaneously conceals and reveals its vague internal movements. It takes a few moments to realize that what moves is actually a swarm of people up on the observation deck. The lively shimmer and shadow tones down the tower's looming ominousness and promises fairytale views to all who enter the museum proper….
[W]hat is the function of an art museum—of the building itself—and what are the effects of being contained within one? Holding art still, a museum invites stilled observations, yet a well-designed floorplan creates movement, a necessary counterpoint to all the stillness….
How I wish I’d been there!
• Says The Little Professor:
A few years ago, I had several students who declared, somewhat indignantly, that they couldn't "relate" to The Tempest. ("Well, I should hope not," I wanted to respond—but didn't.) I understand the desire to find something familiar in a text, the yearning to find one's own priorities and needs nested there. But there's something so depressing about "I can't relate to it": it presumes that the reader's mental activity can end once she stumbles across unfamiliar (or unpleasant) ideas….
Amen, sister.
• Lastly, if you haven’t seen this, look at it right this second. (You’ll need QuickTime to view it.)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 26, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Fee paid in 1942 to Agnes de Mille by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (exclusive of subsequent performance royalties) for choreographing Rodeo: $500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,273.97
(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 26, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There are critics who love the theatre, who manage to express a sort of positive enthusiasm for the theatrical craft even with shows they dislike, and despite having had a wretched evening, remain infectious, enthusiastic and lacking in malice.
"On the other hand, there are those who neither know nor care about theatre. They are disgruntled sports writers or fashion reporters, doubtful poets or failed dramatists, who've been promoted sideways into what their editor considers to be a fairly harmless area—rather as prime ministers tend to reward colleagues who have fallen from grace by making them arts ministers.
"Many of us in the theatre spend our lives being concerned about the views of such people. My advice is don't. Be grateful for the good or constructive ones and disregard the bad ones. If possible read neither, certainly not until much later. Life's too short."
Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 26, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, October 25, 2005
TT: Rebirth
American Ballet Theatre, which is appearing at New York’s City Center through November 6, is dancing Apollo, George Balanchine’s first collaboration with Igor Stravinsky and his oldest surviving ballet (Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered it in 1928). What’s more, they’re doing it with the rarely performed birth scene, which I’ve only seen twice on stage in my eighteen years of dancegoing.
Not surprisingly, I have a lot to say about Apollo in All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, including this explanation of how and why Balanchine cut the birth scene:
Apollo is a portrait of the Greek god of song and music, danced by a cast of seven and accompanied by a small string orchestra. As the curtain rises, Leto gives birth to the young Apollo, who is freed from his swaddling clothes by two handmaidens. He takes up his lyre and plays, then dances about the stage, exploring his godly powers. He is joined by Calliope, the muse of poetry; Polyhymnia, the muse of mime; and Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Each muse dances a solo variation for Apollo, “instructing” him in her art. He dances with Terpsichore alone, then with all three muses. Having achieved his maturity, he then ascends Mount Parnassus to join Zeus, his father, in Olympus, followed by the muses, as Leto and her handmaidens bid him farewell from the earth below.
In 1979 Balanchine eliminated the roles of Leto and the handmaidens, cut the birth scene, and rechoreographed the finale so that Apollo and the muses pose in a sunlit peacock-like formation at center stage instead of ascending to Olympus. He apparently felt that the opening scenes had become dated and were out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the dance. (“I know why I changed it, I took out all the garbage—that’s why!” he told an interviewer in 1981.) New York City Ballet now performs Apollo only in this shortened version, originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, but many other companies continue to dance the birth scene.
I think Balanchine was dead wrong, and the performance I saw on Sunday afternoon, in which Ethan Stiefel danced the title role, showed why.
This is what I wrote about Stiefel several years ago for a Time profile that never made it into print:
In recent seasons, Stiefel has appeared in a startlingly wide range of ballets—Le Corsaire, Billy the Kid, Balanchine's Apollo, even contemporary works by Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp—moving from role to role with a casual virtuosity and unmannered grace that are as all-American as Fred Astaire. No less typically American is his eagerness to take chances: “I’m not saying that I can do everything, but I’ll definitely try everything. I don’t want people to say I’m a great classical ballet dancer, or a modern dancer, or any one kind of dancer. I’m a dancer, period.” Well, not quite. In fact, he is the greatest American-born male ballet dancer to come along since Edward Villella, and quite possibly the most exciting, of either sex and from any country, since Baryshnikov. Period.
I stand by those words, and Sunday’s performance gave me fresh reasons to do so. Unlike any other Apollo I’ve been lucky enough to see on stage, Stiefel understands that the young Apollo is young and unformed, and that it is the muses who must teach him the meaning of beauty. Accordingly, his dancing throughout the first part of the ballet is raw and wild—just what you’d expect from a newborn god, in other words—and it is the prefatory birth scene that puts the wildness in context. On Sunday I found it nothing short of revelatory.
You have four more chances to see Apollo in New York, on October 27, November 2, and at both performances on November 5. Stiefel will only be dancing Apollo once more, on November 2, but all four performances have been staged by Richard Tanner, and so I expect they’ll be worth seeing no matter who’s in them. Go—especially if you’ve been disappointed in recent seasons by New York City Ballet’s slick, flattened-out performances of the ballet Balanchine called “the turning point of my life.”
(Incidentally, Andante has put out a three-disc box set of performances by Stravinsky which includes, among other things, the very first CD release of the little-known recording of Apollo Stravinsky made in 1950 with a pickup ensemble of top New York string players billed as the RCA Victor Orchestra. It’s a little scrappy in spots but for the most part incredibly vivid and revealing, and I commend it to your attention as well.)
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TT: Walking the walk
Last night I went downtown in the pouring rain to see a workshop performance of In Private/In Public, a double bill of one-act plays written by George Hunka (also known as Mr. Superfluities) and directed by Isaac Butler (also known as Mr. Parabasis), two dramabloggers of strong opinions not always identical to my own! I got soaked—but it was worth it.
Both plays deal with relationships gone grossly wrong. In Private, the curtain-raiser, is a darkly drawn sketch of obsessional love, while In Public, the longer of the two, is a “serious comedy” à la Alan Ayckbourn that's chockful of unsettlingly sharp-edged punch lines. Not only are the plays deftly staged, but the acting, by Darian Dauchan, Abe Goldfarb, Daryl Lathon, Sasha Taublieb, and Jennifer Gordon Thomas, is first-rate. Remember those names—you’ll hear them again, and not just from me.
Alas, there’s only one more performance, tonight at eight o’clock at manhattantheatresource, right around the corner from Washington Square Park. The theater is very small, so if you want to come—and I hope you do—call 212-501-4751 to make a reservation.
For more information, go here.
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TT: Number, please
• Aaron Copland's total income in 1941: $4,577.61
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $60,311.58
(Source: Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 Through 1942)
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TT: Almanac
“I mean, this may sound ridiculous, but I’ve never to this day really known what most women think about anything. Completely closed book to me. I mean, God bless them, what would we do without them. But I’ve never understood them. I mean, damn it all, one minute you’re having a perfectly good time and the next, you suddenly see them there like—some old sports jacket or something—literally beginning to come apart at the seams. Floods of tears, smashing your pots, banging the furniture about. God knows what. Both my wives, God bless them, they’ve given me a great deal of pleasure over the years but, by God, they’ve cost me a fortune in fixtures and fittings. All the same. Couldn’t do without them, could we. I suppose.”
Alan Ayckbourn, Absurd Person Singular
| Monday, October 24, 2005
TT: Chimes at midnight
I haven’t seen much opera lately—Broadway has been keeping me hopping—but when the Met announced that Bryn Terfel, whom Our Girl and I admire greatly, would be singing the title role in Falstaff, my favorite opera, I knew I had to be there. The only question was who to bring along. Having recently subjected the beauteous Maccers to a third-rate play, it struck me that she might be a worthy seatmate, and though she’s been preoccupied with starting a cult, she agreed to join me on Saturday for dinner and Verdi.
On Thursday afternoon the Met press office left a message on my voice mail in New York. I was holed up at an undisclosed location, taking J.J. Gittes’ advice (a fat lot of good it did him!), so I didn't find out until late that night that Terfel, whose longstanding back problems have made him a chronic canceller, was bailing out of Saturday’s performance, the last of the run. Sighing deeply, I left a message for Maccers assuring her that she was more than welcome to do the same. No way, she replied the next day, and sure enough, she arrived at the Teachout Museum on Saturday night, no more prepared than I for the comedy of errors that was about to ensue.
I should have known we were headed for harm's way when we showed up at the restaurant and found that its doors were locked (a water main had broken). Unfazed by this ill omen, we improvised a tasty dinner next door, then hustled down to the Met, where things got off to a surprisingly decent start. Louis Otey, who replaced Terfel, is no Falstaff, but he’s a good singer and a good sport, and he threw himself into the impossible task of covering for one of opera's most electrifying performers. It helped that Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, the funniest character tenor around (he plays the ugly frog in Mark Morris’ staging of Rameau’s Platée), was up to his usual tricks as Bardolfo. Moreover, James Levine, who for the past few seasons has been very much an in-and-out runner, rose to the occasion, conducting in a positive and involving manner from the first downbeat on.
The curtain fell on the first scene, and we waited…and waited. “There’s trouble in paradise,” I whispered to Maccers, and sure enough, a nervous-looking gentleman in a suit materialized seconds later and informed the audience that Fouchecourt had slipped, fallen, and hurt himself during the scene change, and would be replaced by his cover singer. “I think the thing to do is take the first intermission now,” the spokesman said. No sooner did the house lights come up then Maccers and I scooted to the bar for champagne, wondering what the next disaster would be.
What happened instead was a not-so-minor miracle, made possible in part by the galvanizing presence of a first-rank artist. I can’t say enough good things about Patricia Racette, who was singing Alice Ford on Saturday, so I’ll simply repeat here what I wrote about her in the New York Daily News a few years ago on a similar occasion:
Patricia Racette was faced with the unenviable task of replacing the much-loved Renee Fleming as Violetta, the doomed courtesan, in Franco Zeffirelli's expensive new production of La Traviata, which opened Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. A lesser singer might have clutched under the pressure. Instead, Racette swung for the fences—and smashed the ball out of the park.
Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of "Sempre libera," and moved boldly from the black despair of "Addio del passato" to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening's end was fully deserved: rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity…
Racette was every bit as good on Saturday, and her determination to prevail set her colleagues on fire. Instead of staggering around looking stricken, the cast, Otey very much included, had a ball. It was Maccers’ first Falstaff, and she went home happy. It must have been, oh, my twentieth, and so did I.
Was it a great performance, or merely a great occasion? Falstaff, after all, is no knockabout farce but one of Western art’s most searching commentaries on the vanity of human wishes, no less so because it says what it has to say with a smile. What makes Verdi's Falstaff immortal is the comic finality with which his remaining delusions of potency are dispelled—and the nobleman's grace with which he accepts his reversal of fortune. Verdi, who was seventy-nine years old when he completed Falstaff, understood such matters in his bones, which is why Falstaff is the most Shakespearean of all operas. Sir John may be a fool to chase after Alice and Meg, but if he is, so are we all, and there is nothing even slightly absurd about the piercing moment when he assures Alice that he was not always the fat, tumescent rake who stands before her:
When I was page to the Duke of Norfolk,
I was slender, a mirage,
light and fair, gentle, gentle.
That was my verdant April season,
the joyous Maytime of my life.
Then I was so lean, so lithe, so slender,
you could have slipped me through a ring.
Arrigo Boito’s original Italian words are deliciously light-footed—Quand’ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk/ero sottile, sotille, sotille—and the miniature aria Verdi spins out of them, barely a half-minute long, is no less delicious in its scampery, self-mocking grace. To hear it is to peel away the layers of bluster and behold the humanity of a buffoon who, long after his “verdant April” has turned to chilly October, still craves the comforting sweetness of young love. A little later we see him humiliated, and though he deserves it a hundred times over, we feel a tug of sympathy, knowing there is more to him than mere roguery. Is there a more poignant moment in opera than when he stands before the mocking crowd and joins bravely in their laughter?
Rare is the Falstaff, be it in the opera house or the theater, who understands this (Orson Welles did, with good reason). One could hardly have expected Louis Otey to improvise at the last minute so complex an interpretation, and he didn't: instead, he played Sir John for laughs all the way, and got them. Nor is the Met’s ancient Falstaff, performed in the crumbling shell of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1964 production, likely to inspire such interpretative subtleties in those forced to work within its constricting limits. Fortunately, Verdi’s quicksilver music tells us everything we really need to know, and when the whole cast comes downstage at the very end and joins Sir John in a rousing fugue whose first line is All the world's a joke, it’s hard not to suspect that you’re hearing more or less what Robert Browning had in mind when he spoke of “the C Major of this life,” the key in which young lovers are wed, a husband and wife reconciled, an aging blowhard humbled and forgiven, and the world made whole again.
Of course I cried. Comedy does that to you. So does life.
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TT: Marching orders
Found in a fortune cookie at dinner on Sunday:
ACCEPT THE NEXT PROPOSITION YOU HEAR.
I'm still waiting....
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TT: Rerun
June 2004:
Could it be that I’m through with series TV for good? I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not that I’m a snob about TV. The problem is that I no longer care for the idea of committing myself to weekly installments of anything as repetitive as a dramatic series. I suppose it’d be melodramatic to say that life’s too short to spend it watching the same set of characters each week—but melodramatic or not, I think that might be the best way to explain be how I’m feeling these days. For the moment, anyway….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Elia Kazan's fee in 1950 for directing the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire: $175,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $1,356,567.27
(Source: Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan)
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TT: Almanac
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,—yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
Robert Browning, "Abt Vogler"
| Friday, October 29, 2004
TT: Almost forgot
I wrapped up my foliage-related travels this afternoon so that I could hear Wesla Whitfield at Danny’s Skylight Room tonight. I just got back. Wow! I’ll be writing about her opening night in next Sunday’s “Second City” column, so I don’t want to steal my own thunder, but if you’re loose on Saturday or Sunday, go hear her. Nobody—but nobody—sings standards better.
For more information on Wesla, go here.
For more information on Danny’s, go here.
If you can’t go and want to hear what you’re missing, buy this CD.
See you Monday.
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TT: Twelve noisy stereotypes
I returned to Manhattan, picked up today's Wall Street Journal, and what did I see? Me, writing about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men and the New Group’s production of Michael Murphy’s Sin (A Cardinal Deposed).
I liked Twelve Angry Men in spite of myself:
For those unfamiliar with the plot (there must be a few of you out there), “Twelve Angry Men” tells how a New York jury decides the fate of a minority-group teenager accused of stabbing his father to death. At first the vote is eleven to one in favor of conviction, but the lone dissenter, played here by Boyd Gaines (“Contact”) and in the film by Henry Fonda, is determined to convert his furious colleagues, one at a time. Each of the jurors, who are identified only by numbers, is presented as an ethnic or cultural stereotype—an unintentionally absurd touch, seeing as how the script, in earnest ’50s style, seeks to persuade us that the defendant is a helpless victim of circumstances à la Stephen Sondheim’s “Gee, Officer Krupke” (“We ain’t no delinquents/We’re misunderstood/Deep down inside us there is good!”)….
Mr. Gaines is admirably understated as the saintly Juror No. 8—not even slightly like Fonda, who milked the good-guy angle for all it was worth and then some, and then some more. (He was even dressed in a white suit!) Philip Bosco’s otherwise fine performance as the belligerent Juror No. 3, by contrast, is a shade too reminiscent of Lee J. Cobb, Fonda’s nemesis in the film. Everybody else is good or better, and Allen Moyer has reproduced a grubby big-city jury room circa 1954 with eerie exactitude, though I found it a bit cute when the whole set rolled sideways to reveal the men’s room.
Needless to say, “Twelve Angry Men” is a feel-righteous period piece, a choice specimen of what I think of as the American version of socialist realism. All its ambiguities are pat, and when the curtain comes down you know exactly what you’re supposed to go home thinking. It’s as if you’ve just been worked over by a politically correct masseur who pummels you in all the right places. Fortunately, you don’t have to swallow the message to enjoy the massage….
I also liked Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), with some qualifications:
John Cullum plays Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who was forced to resign as archbishop of the diocese of Boston when a pair of civil suits revealed that he had covered up horrific allegations of child abuse by numerous priests in his charge, including the now-notorious John Geoghan and Paul Shanley. The script is derived from the transcripts of a pair of videotaped depositions in which Cardinal Law, who initially blamed the cover-up on his subordinates, was confronted with an avalanche of damning written testimony proving that he was fully aware of the charges—and chose to disregard them.
I tend not to be a fan of documentary plays. For one thing, transcripts aren’t theater, as the Culture Project’s recent production of “Guantánamo” recently proved at tedious length. Not only do such “plays” tend to be shapeless, but such inherent dramatic power as they may have is too often drowned out by the noisy clatter of the stacking of political decks. I feared that “Sin” might suffer from the latter problem—especially when I saw that the liberal Catholic group Voice of the Faithful was handing out leaflets at its performances—but Mr. Murphy, to his credit, plays it down the center. To be sure, he’s edited and reshaped the transcripts extensively, compressing two suits into one and several lawyers into two, but his purpose was to be true to the substance of the proceedings, and so far as I know he has not distorted them in any significant way.
For the most part “Sin” also works as theater, though I think Mr. Murphy has made a big mistake in following Cardinal Law’s devastating testimony with a brief epilogue in which one of the victims is allowed to speak—the curtain should fall as the humiliated Cardinal walks slowly out of the room. Otherwise, “Sin” scrupulously avoids pulpit-pounding, instead letting the horrors speak for themselves, which they do….
No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning’s Journal, or do this.
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TT: Almanac
"Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond—a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art—which is art."
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
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OGIC: Paul Taylor, again
Picking up where I left off:
For a dance about hell set to music from hell, Dante Variations is impressively chipper. A considerable portion of the piece is frankly comic: one solo dancer gamely performs with her hands tied behind her back, one with shackles on his ankles, another trailing something from one foot (or perhaps suffering a hot foot). These sections veer toward cuteness, however; they rely a milligram too heavily on props and conceits for their charm. The darker sections of the dance make a stronger impression. Especially wonderful are the pyramidal tableaux in which the dancers freeze at curtain-up and curtain-down, like figures in a lurid frieze; and the fantastical Boschian creatures, built out of dancers, that lumber and menace throughout. Intensifying the whole thing is the jaw-dropping lighting by Jennifer Tipton. Sometimes she bathes the back of the stage in darkness that a dancer can all but disappear into, eerily remaining just faintly discernible; at other points she lights the stage in such a way that the dancers cast giant shadow monsters—no bunnies here—on the back wall. These effects are nothing less than fantastic, and go a long way toward making the piece so deliciously like nightmares.
And then Promethean Fire. Ah, hell. How am I going to write about this dance without sounding like a publicist? Here goes nothing.
In an interesting bit of sequencing, Taylor followed his dance about hell with a dance that is widely believed to be about 9/11. I first saw Promethean Fire in New York City last March, so I knew what I was in for Sunday night. And I didn't know. This dance is so powerfully beautiful, I can't imagine ever being truly ready for it, even if I'm lucky enough to see it a dozen times. It does seem to be about the attacks. But the dance is also more universal and more abstract than that; what it mostly represents is the complex of emotional responses those events provoked. Or, to put it still more generally, the kinds of emotional responses they provoked. I doubt that Taylor set out to choreograph on 9/11; rather, he seems to have written a dance that unavoidably reflected the psychic ground he inhabited in the months following the attacks.
What was that psychic ground? Suffering and shock are in the dance, and consolation, love, renewal. I honestly don't know how to describe its content any more specifically. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch. I alternated between trying to read it—knowing as I did that it had been pegged as Taylor's 9/11 dance, and being as I am the type that looks for the story in everything—and being saved from thought altogether by the over-the-top beauty of the thing. A couple of times during those brain-dead spells, I thought of a flower opening. Something inexplicably but inarguably, factually gorgeous.
But Terry, I think I've been skirting your question:
But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.
Well, when you put it that way…yes. I saw fire, falling, and collapse in the dance. Just in glimpses, but there all the same. And on paper, you know, that sounds as though it could be such a terrible idea. But you feel the same way I do about the dance. So—to bat the ball back to you again—why does it work? I have a notion about this, beyond the simple fact of Taylor being a genius. But I kind of want to hear what you think.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, October 29, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Easily amused
Tonight I walked by someone's elaborately ready-for-Halloween house in my neighborhood, Hyde Park. Four fresh faux graves graced the front yard. Two of the inscriptions on the gravestones:
SEE, I
TOLD YOU
I WAS
SICK!
and
BETTER
HERE
THAN
EVANSTON
I giggled all the way home.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, October 29, 2004 | Permanent
link | Thursday, October 28, 2004
OGIC: Paul Taylor, continued
As Terry mentioned, the Paul Taylor program I saw Sunday night at the College of Du Page's McAninch Arts Center included Taylor's great 2002 dance "Promethean Fire." The other dances on the program were "Klezmerbluegrass," in its world premiere, and "Dante Variations," another new dance that premiered earlier this year. This was my second time seeing Taylor's company at the comfy McAninch Center. Despite the longish drive from Chicago, it's a nice place to see a performance. There's not a bad seat in the house.
"Klezmerbluegrass" was vivid and delightful, alternating jubilant sections danced by the ensemble with more wistful solos and duets. The group parts reminded me of two of my all-time favorite dances, Eliot Feld's "The Jig Is Up" and "Skara Brae," both of which are set to traditional Irish music and make me want to dance all the way home. The ensemble parts of "Klezmerbluegrass" had that same care-extinguishing exultation about them, which never felt very far away, even during the most brooding solo. Commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (with support from the McAninch) to commemorate 350 years of Jewish life in America, Taylor's new dance convincingly celebrates the capacity of the communities we form to blunt the occupational angst of individual existence. It doesn't, much to its credit, pretend that they can cure it.
I have more to say about the other two dances on the program, especially "Promethean Fire," but it will have to wait a bit. I'm blogging sub rosa right now, and I don't want to push my luck….
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, October 28, 2004 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, October 27, 2004
OGIC: A bit of boosterism from my corner
In The New Republic, another critic discovers the merits of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, even if the mountain had to come to Mohamet. Robert Brustein minces no words in praising Rose Rage, just closed in New York, and reserves the most extravagant plaudits for the production's devastating Richard:
Part III features the emergence of the most fascinating character in the play—Shakespeare's first well-written villain, Richard Crookback. This hedgehog, born with a full set of teeth, is a man destined "to bite the world." As played by Jay Whittaker, he not only brandishes a straight razor, he is a straight razor—you can cut yourself simply by touching him. Anticipating his intent to murder Edward's two sons in the tower, he licks the kids' faces with his viperish tongue. Glowering, sneering, a tuft of beard beneath his lower lip, a rakish black homburg on his head, Whittaker is as blistering and cruel and witty a Richard as I've ever seen—and I've seen a lot of good ones, including Olivier, McKellen, and Branagh.
In this particular as well as several others, Brustein's review is in agreement with the one Terry wrote for the WSJ last winter, which I in turn agreed with wholeheartedly. As for his wake-up call about Chicago Shakespeare generally—and one feels the rest of Chicago theater can't be far behind in getting his attention—
To single out individual actors from the production is to disregard the general excellence of this remarkable company. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has been in existence now for eighteen years, and I am ashamed to say that until Rose Rage I had never seen it in performance. If this production is typical of the company's work, then it is clearly one of the most talented, electric, and dynamic theaters in the country.
Aw. Being scooped is never fun, but there's no shame in it.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
"C. D. paused under the archway, breathing dedicatedly. Picture if you will a C. D. gone mad. A bull in a china shop—an aesthetic bull that is—a bull run mad on aestheticism. For if American education had struck him as eclecticism run mad he was striking me as aestheticism run mad. His eyes shone and darted about ferociously coveting all they beheld. His mouth salivated (at least he licked it several times in a kind of mopping up gesture), his hands clenched and unclenched, his brow perspired; a most unnatural fever seemed to have overtaken him. And then he got a grip on himself, marched boldly into the room, took a good look around him and relaxed. And he looked upon everything and he looked everywhere in that old man's way of his that struck me now as being also so very like that of a very young baby—so lovingly, so gently, so wonderingly. But with an avidity too, that avidity special to C. D. A hungry look cast upon each object of beauty as it flowed and filled and satisfied the innermost reaches of his soul. His eyes would seize upon the object with the impatience of youth, then—here was the difference—come to terms with it; set it down: the eyes avidly picking up each beloved object in salutation—putting it down gently in farewell. Eyes look your last! Strange old man, heart-breaking, heart-broken old man—to be so moved by the polish of wood, the curve of a chair-leg, the glint of crystal, the fade of Aubusson. As though he were missing it all already. There. There. Don't mind so much; don't let yourself miss it."
Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: P.P.C.
I promised to tell you all about my trip to Minnesota, and I will, but not yet. I just got home from the New York premiere of Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), and I'll be getting up first thing in the morning to review it for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. After that I’ve got to knock off a quick piece about Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Once that’s finished and filed, I’m planning to stuff a couple of CDs in my shoulder bag (most definitely including this one), go pick up a rental car, and hit the road. I’m heading for the Hudson House Inn, where I expect to spend a couple of days sleeping late, eating well, and looking at the fall foliage.
I’ll be back some time Friday afternoon…but you know what? I might not blog again until Monday! How about that? It’s more likely that I’ll at least post my Friday Journal teaser and an almanac entry, but if I don’t, fear not—I shall return.
Later.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Far afield
I really like what Our Girl posted yesterday about the advantages of letting your mind wander while listening to music. I do it, too—I think everybody does, though some of us are more reluctant to admit it than others. For that matter, I suspect that many, perhaps even most musicians not infrequently let their minds wander while playing music. The late Dick Wellstood, a wonderful jazz pianist who had an intellectual streak, once told Whitney Balliett in an interview that people might be surprised to know what “ordinary daylight things” he thought about while soloing (I’m quoting from memory—I loaned the book in question to a friend a few months ago, and just realized that she hadn’t returned it yet).
I felt a prick in my memory as I read Our Girl’s posting, and suddenly it came to me that E.M. Forster had written something on this very subject. I couldn’t quite recall what or where, but thirty seconds’ worth of Googling led me to the fifth chapter of Howards End, in which Forster describes Helen Schlegel’s thoughts as she listens to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:
For the Andante had begun—very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven had written, and, to Helen's mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and then she smiled at her Cousin Frieda. But Frieda, listening to Classical Music, could not respond. Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could not make him inattentive; there were lines across his forehead, his lips were parted, his pince-nez at right angles to his nose, and he had laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to her was Aunt Juley, so British, and wanting to tap. How interesting that row of people was! What diverse influences had gone to the making! Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said "Heigho," and the Andante came to an end. Applause, and a round of "wunderschoning" and pracht volleying from the German contingent. Margaret started talking to her new young man; Helen said to her aunt: "Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing"; and Tibby implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum….
(Read the whole thing here. I don’t like Forster in general or Howards End in particular, but I do like this chapter.)
Now tell me something, dear OGIC. Here’s what you wrote about watching Paul Taylor the other night:
I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself "What does it mean?" and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation—as it continually does, if it is any good—I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.
I couldn’t have put it better. “Forgetting about words and language themselves” is exactly what you have to do in order to experience a non-verbal art form in all its rich ambiguity. But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Haiku for opera buffs
A reader writes:
Shouting "Brava!", sir,
Might impress your friends from Queens,
But not Joe Volpe.
I wish I were that clever….
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Others must fail
A reader writes:
For your next blog perhaps you can explain for the rest of us just why New Yorkers are suddenly enamored of the word schadenfreude. I had heard it once or twice until a couple of months ago and now suddenly it's everywhere. What gives? And now there it is
in today's New York Times, on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. There must be an explanation.
I don’t read Frank Rich’s column—it hurts my ears—so I didn’t notice that he’d had occasion to deploy one of my own favorite words. I try not to drop foreign words or phrases into my writing (in fact, I told a member of my criticism class yesterday to remove C’est vrai and Gesamtkunstwerk from the piece of his that I was editing). Once in a while, though, there’s no good alternative, and schadenfreude is one of those rare exceptions to my personal rule. To derive malicious joy from someone else’s troubles is, if I may be so bold as to say it, precisely the sort of concept for which one would expect the Germans to have coined a word, and it seems to me altogether fitting that we should have taken it over without change.
I must admit, though, that I hadn’t noticed any sharp uptick in the popularity of Schadenfreude: The Word. I checked just now and noticed, somewhat to my surprise, that it appeared only twice on this blog before today. Google returned 127,000 hits when I searched the word a little while ago, among them a couple of blogs and Web pages for a Chicago comedy ensemble and “a monthly deathrock and gothrock night in Washington, D.C.” (that one I like). I also ran across several references to Joseph Epstein’s clever little book about envy, whose treatment of schadenfreude I commend to your attention (he calls it “a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions").
Be it in German, English, or pig Latin, I expect schadenfreude is here to stay—and no matter what happens at the polls next Tuesday night, I also expect that a large percentage of voters will be experiencing it come Wednesday morning. That might just explain why my correspondent has been encountering the S-word so frequently of late. Nice it’s not, but it’s definitely part and parcel of the human condition, at least for those of us who aren’t saintly.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“Unrequited love is the only relationship in which I have ever been able completely to realise my capacities as a human being.”
Edward Sackville-West, diary entry, Feb. 12, 1953
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, October 27, 2004 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, October 26, 2004
OGIC: Great entrances
Erin O'Connor has a thread going at Critical Mass about memorable first paragraphs. One of my all-time favorites is from an utterly unknown book, Elaine Dundy's The Old Man and Me. I've posted it on the blog before, and do you know what? I'm going to post it again:
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone's nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again—leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.
I sort of can't get over this paragraph. I think it is just about perfect. I hope Ms. Dundy wrote it after she wrote the rest of the novel, because if I were her I would have stopped dead after writing those two sentences, thinking "My work is done here." (But the rest of the novel is very good too.)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, October 26, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Surrender
Last week, Terry asked me about my experience watching dance. His question was a timely one; just last night I pilgrimaged west to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in a one-night-only performance (the kickoff, mind you, of a fifty-state tour) in the suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Terry's book, his recent blogging about dance, and the questions he posed to me were on my mind.
If I remember correctly, the first dance I saw was Balanchine's Jewels, circa 1992, with Terry (natch). We sat in an upper level of the auditorium, which proved useful for my rather anxiously held purposes: to get it, and to be able to prove that I had gotten it by having something thoughtful, or if possible penetrating, to say about it afterward. From our high-altitude vantage point, the dance looked like architecture in motion. It was on that level—not in terms of the dancers' individual moves and gestures but in terms of the kaleidoscopic formations and patterns they all made together—that I tried to grasp what I was seeing. This was my way of trying to intellectualize it: to make it into something I could read. In keeping with what Terry wrote, I don't think I got as much out of that initial outing as I did from subsequent dance performances where I was more at ease watching. That first time out, I felt almost as though I was performing. I was intent on having the correct response. But there's no such thing.
I want to make a brief detour here and talk about live classical music (don't blink—it won't last long and it may never happen again!). Terry drew a distinction between narrative and non-narrative art forms, grouping painting, dance, and music as not essentially intellectual. For me, a more operative divide has always been the one between performing and non-performing arts; my grasp of the latter is decent, of the former pathetic. When I came to Chicago, though, I started going to the Symphony semi-regularly—say, half a dozen times a year (a habit that has now, sadly, dropped off). Somewhere in that time, I reached a deeply satisfying understanding of how to enjoy a classical concert, if you happen to be me. I realized that if I let my mind wander a bit, I would actually hear the music better than if I spent the whole concert policing my concentration. At some point I started accepting the meandering thinking I was doing at concerts, however far-flung, as an associative response to the music rather than a philistine, well-nigh punishable distraction from it. At that point I moved from thinking of concert-going as vaguely hard work that just might confer virtue (like church-going) to thinking of it as an authentic sensual luxury.
Because Terry had started this conversation and I had been mulling a response, I was quite conscious of my minute-to-minute reactions to the Paul Taylor dances I saw last night. Speaking generally—though I'll have more to say later about the individual pieces—I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself "What does it mean?" and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation—as it continually does, if it is any good—I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, October 26, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Teacher's pets
I’ll be heading up to the Columbia School of Journalism first thing this morning (too damn early!) to teach what I guess could be called a master class in thumbsucking. I’m spending three hours | | |
