About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, November 24, 2006
TT: Hairdressers of the world, unite!
Enough already with the leftovers—it’s time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I render summary judgment on two off-Broadway shows in today's paper, Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only and a revival of Suddenly Last Summer:
Paul Rudnick reminds me of Nuke LaLoosh, the rookie pitcher in “Bull Durham” who had a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head. If it’s jokes you want, Mr. Rudnick’s your man, and most of them are funny to boot. For a stand-up comedian, that’d be more than enough—but Mr. Rudnick is a playwright, and “Regrets Only,” his latest effort, proves yet again that it takes more than punchlines to make a play….
Hank Hadley (George Grizzard), a ruggedly handsome fashion designer who just happens to be gay, is incensed when the husband (David Rasche) of his best friend (Christine Baranski) agrees to help President Bush draft a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Thanks to Mr. Rudnick’s jokes and the precision-tooled acting of his cast, “Regrets Only” stays afloat until intermission, at which point things get really, really stupid: Hank talks all the gays in Manhattan into going on strike, meaning that Broadway shuts down and nobody can get a hairdo. Curtain? Not quite, alas, for we have to sit through a semi-serious closing scene in which Mr. Rudnick whacks us over the head with his moral, which is that Gays Are People, Too.
I wonder whether it occurred to Mr. Rudnick that the second act of “Regrets Only,” in which gays are portrayed as playwrights, actors, hairdressers, caterers, florists, and travel agents, is itself a mortifyingly quaint piece of stereotyping….
Tennessee Williams is widely thought to be a great playwright—but not by me. Yes, he wrote one indisputably great play, “The Glass Menagerie,” and I can also see why so many people like “A Streetcar Named Desire” so much more than I do. Most of the rest of his vast output, however, strikes me as overblown and underbelievable, with “Suddenly Last Summer” locking up the booby prize for sheer absurdity. I’ve no idea how Williams’ reputation for seriousness survived its 1958 premiere, much less why the Roundabout Theatre Company has gone to the trouble of reviving what is surely the most unintentionally silly play ever written by a well-known author….
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to my review, plus plenty of other good stuff. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
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TT: Ballet? Never heard of it
In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I cast a cold eye on the desperate state of dance in America. Just a quarter-century ago, ballet and modern dance were vital, exciting, and (above all) popular. Now they’re at a frighteningly low ebb. What happened—and what can be done to pump up the volume?
To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 24, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction—the wisecrack."
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 24, 2006 | Permanent
link | Thursday, November 23, 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 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)
• 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)
• Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 23, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, November 23, 2006 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 22, 2006
TT: Here I go again
I’m off to Connecticut for a four-day Thanksgiving marathon, returning to New York on Saturday afternoon to embark on a week-long playgoing marathon. It’s all a bit too much, especially since I filed two Wall Street Journal columns yesterday. I wish I had the steam to post more extensively, but right now it’s all I can do to pack my bag. Expect the usual theater-related postings on Thursday and Friday, but otherwise I plan to lay low until next Monday. Apologies.
In the meantime, let me leave you with some pieces worth reading:
• Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post went to Atlanta to look at the High Museum’s Morris Louis retrospective and filed this first-rate report about the declining fortunes of a once-fashionable abstractionist who is now criminally underrated. I wasn’t greatly impressed with the High Museum when I visited Atlanta last July, but Gopnik’s piece made me want to jump on the next southbound plane.
• Speaking of museums, Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal has written a tough and trenchant column
on the latest round of deaccessioning. Here’s the nut:
Just last week the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., announced that it was selling more than 200 objects from its collection to raise $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. "Deaccessioning," as the practice is known, used to be the tool of last resort for acquiring new art. But lately it's become the tool of first resort, with museums strip-mining their collections just to build a war chest….
What's so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses. Because of their transcendent importance, museum objects occupy a position outside the pressures of the marketplace. Yet more and more museums are treating these objects as financial assets that they can tap at any time.
What he said.
• Out of the Mouths of Babes Dept.: Joan Didion, who has written a stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking that will open on Broadway later this season, recently talked to an interviewer about the difference between screenwriting and playwriting:
Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there’s nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is….Something I’ve always known and said and thought about the screen is that if it’s anything in the world, it’s literal. It’s so literal that there’s a whole lot you can’t do because you’re stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
What she said.
That’ll have to hold you for now—I need to go to bed immediately. See you around.
P.S. Check out the new Top Fives.
P.P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose."
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 21, 2006
TT: Almanac
"We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us."
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
| Monday, November 20, 2006
TT: From the sublime...
I walked through Chicago’s Midway Airport last Thursday to the sounds of the King Cole Trio’s 1944 recording of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? It’s a masterpiece, one of the most perfect jazz piano recordings ever made, and hearing it in an airport instead of Muzak was a little miracle of serendipity.
Now I’m back in Midway Airport, en route from St. Louis to New York. The airport management put up Christmas decorations over the weekend, and they’re playing Kenny G’s recording of “The First Noel.”
Sigh.
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TT: Out of the way
I paid a visit last Thursday to a Frank Lloyd Wright house located in the suburbs of St. Louis. Known to specialists as the Kraus House, this two-bedroom, 1,900-square-foot home, completed in 1956, was painstakingly restored and opened to the public a couple of years ago. Most of Wright’s best-known houses are based on square or rectangular grids, but this one is an exception, a sly, witty study in triangles and parallelograms that fit together in unexpected, sometimes startling ways. It’s one of the few surviving Wright houses that contains all of the furnishings and fabrics that were custom-designed by the architect for the original owner. Of the smaller Wright houses I’ve visited, including the two I stayed in last year, it’s the one I like best—so far.
From St. Louis I drove south to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I spent a long weekend hanging out with my family. The Web has become so graphics-intensive that it’s now difficult to view most newspaper sites and art-related blogs and newspaper sites without a high-speed connection, so instead of treading water in the frenzied present, I’ve been lazing around in the fondly remembered past. Among other things, my mother dug up a receipt for the Wurlitzer spinet piano that my father bought for me in 1970, the instrument on which I learned to play. Back then it cost $679.50, the equivalent of $3,423.26 in 2005 dollars. I’m glad I didn’t know then how much they paid for it, but my mother assures me that they got their money’s worth, and all things considered, I’m inclined to agree.
It’s quiet in Smalltown, so much so that half-audible, half-remembered sounds are constantly catching my ear:
• The hollow, rattly clunk of the back door of my mother’s house. (Nobody ever comes in through the front door.)
• The rumble of the furnace fan each time it starts up.
• The faint ticking and buzzing of the electric clock in my bedroom.
• The lonely, distant wail of the freight-train whistle that blows at bedtime.
One alien sound that I brought along with me is the ghostly whistle emitted by the modem of my iBook as it “shakes hands” with the dialup line via which I log onto the Web. “Are you playing music back there?” my mother asked when she heard it yesterday morning.
The only work of art I’ve consumed since arriving in Smalltown (not counting my brother’s home-smoked pork loin) is Lonesome Dove, the four-part 1989 TV movie based on Larry McMurtry’s Western novel. An expansive, elegiac tribute to the hard men of the American frontier, it's every bit as good as I’d heard, and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are, if anything, better still. I’ve also been rereading Dawn Powell’s The Locusts Have No King and drafting a column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, I’ve been taking it fairly easy, and plan to keep on doing so after I return to New York on Monday evening. It's Thanksgiving week, and even a drama critic deserves some time off.
Starting on Saturday, I’ll be spending the next nine days seeing High Fidelity, David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, the New York premiere of David Mamet’s adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance, revivals of Company, Two Trains Running, and Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone, and performances by the Amelia Piano Trio and the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Gulp!
Details to come, but first I have to drive back to St. Louis and catch a plane to New York. Don’t expect to hear from me again until Wednesday. In the meantime, go buy a turkey.
P.S. This is where I took my family to eat on Sunday. It was fabulous.
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TT: Almanac
"We had now arrived at the museum and our attention was directed to the pictures. Once more I was impressed by Elliott's knowledge and taste. He shepherded me around the rooms as though I were a group of tourists, and no professor of art could have discoursed more instructively than he did. Making up my mind to come again by myself when I could wander at will and have a good time, I submitted; after a while he looked at his watch.
"'Let us go,' he said. 'I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists. We will finish another day.'
"I thanked him warmly when we separated. I went my way perhaps a wiser but certainly a peevish man."
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
| Friday, November 18, 2005
TT and OGIC: The two of us
In case you're new to this blog, two different people post here: Terry Teachout, who lives in New York City, and Our Girl in Chicago, otherwise known as Laura Demanski, who lives in, er, Chicago.
The headlines on Terry's posts start out with "TT."
The headlines on Our Girl's posts start out with "OGIC."
Enough said. Read on. Enjoy.
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OGIC: Friday wild card
As longtime readers know, I'm a big hockey fan, though tonight the sport made mincemeat of my nerves and left me, in the end, sad and wistful. (Thanks for the consolation call, Dad. I have the best dad.)
As longtime readers also know, I occasionally smuggle in hockey content here, though I'm usually decently artful about dressing it up as arts content. Not today. This one's nakedly a sports post, though it does offer links to a number of good writers—on hockey, natch. But beyond the aesthetic attractions of words strung together nicely that include "goon" and "icing," this post is in no way arts-related.
Because the vast majority of sports writing is so banal, good sports writing gives me more pleasure than perhaps any other kind of good writing. There's an element of happy surprise attached to finding something smart and interesting in a desert of hackwork, and there's a luxury as well to great writing about inconsequential things. At least as much as in the arts, I think, the invention of blogging has enhanced the quantity and quality of worthwhile sports writing out there. Something about the combination of the ephemerality of sports and the passion they inspire makes them a subject perfectly suited for blog coverage. For a hockey fan in this country where we're considered quaint curiosities, hockey blogs have become nothing less than a lifeline for me to like-minded souls. And since the end of the lockout and the game's return, it seems to me that the hockey blogging scene has grown especially vibrant and fun. So I share with you a few of the essential stops in my daily hockey blog tour:
• The original: Eric McErlain's Off Wing Opinion is the granddaddy of hockey blogs, and covers notable news from throughout the sports world. Because Eric's one of the best known bloggers in all of sports and has a puck and a red line bannering his site, he does a great service to our sadly neglected (in the U.S.) sport, every single day.
• While not, strictly speaking, a hockey blogger, Colby Cosh earns a place on this list because when he does blog hockey, he does it unbeatably. Colby knows a ton about everything, so his hockey posts tend to be, shall we say, broadly informed and inspired.
• Jeff and Alanah at Vancouver Canucks Op-Ed are booksellers and hockey fans. What more need be said? I will say, too, that they're better than anyone I know at the art of the good-natured insult. This is a formidable skill, and their blog is a delight.
• Dour is one word for Tom Benjamin, who runs the Canucks Corner NHL weblog out of Canucks Corner. Authoritative is another. Smart is another. Half the time you see his name on other blogs, it's attached to the word "cranky," but no one who says so would think of skipping his site.
• This one's new, at least to me, but I'm crazy about Jes Golbez's Hockey Rants. It's endlessly entertaining. I look back on Jes's Halloween gallery of hockey ghouls with particular fondness.
There endeth today's recruiting effort. Enjoy your weekend.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 18, 2005 | Permanent
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OGIC: All about Anna
Speaking of Anna Karenina, which someone was in the post below, I heard a fantastic talk on Anna's suicide last week and wrote it up very briefly here.
It has been at least fifteen years since I read Tolstoy's novel, and it's not a book I ever close-read. So Gary Saul Morson's observation that Anna, in her last scene, is consciously copying the death of the watchman in her first scene struck me like a jolt of electricity. I always took the rail accident of the first scene as just so much ill boding, which I believe is the standard lazy reading, but Morson exploded it by very simply pointing out that Anna remembers the accident and decides to follow suit: "And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do." (I'm quoting from this on-line edition.) That's not foreshadowing, it's the opposite. Rather than being ready-built as a meaningful sign, the watchman's death is only retrospectively endowed with significance by Anna and the decision she makes based on her sudden memory of it.
If ever you have the opportunity to hear Morson speak, you should do so.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 18, 2005 | Permanent
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OGIC: The talented Mr. Watman
Is anyone writing as sharply and accessibly on fiction right now, with so little fanfare, as Max Watman? When one of his refreshingly direct Fiction Chronicles pops up in the New Criterion, I can't click through fast enough. He covers the most gabbed-about books; he knows exactly what he thinks; and unlike many book critics, he is intensely reader-focused. There's an attention to the visceral experience of reading in his reviews that I greatly appreciate and don't find much of elsewhere, at least not in combination with such sound literary judgment and good writing (when I do, it is more likely to be on a favorite lit blog than in print). Watman seems to place a premium on conveying what it feels like to read a book while one is reading it, with results that are always helpful and frequently revelatory. Here, for example, is the beginning of his take on Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown:
Early in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown I felt a sense of awe. It wasn’t specific. It wasn’t tied to a single scene or a particular descriptive. It was as if the entire thing, the rhythm of the book, the pulse of the language was bigger than what I’d been reading. It was a change, there was more here. I felt as if I were a much younger man, or perhaps a child, flushed with the intensity of imagination in literature, cracking open Anna Karenina for the first time and being swept away. For now, we who read constantly find most of our pleasures in smaller ways, rereading a short shelf, or finding relatively small accomplishments in literature we like. Nothing seems comparable to the bedrock of one’s literary education, and it is a very rare reading experience that is remotely reminiscent of the Great Books of your private canon.
Rushdie is so sure of himself, such a strong man of letters, that his language can capture that feeling of fullness. I don’t think it is only in comparison to the dithering and hedging of our constantly self-effacing, self-deprecating contemporaries that Rushdie’s hand feels steady pushing the story forward.
I felt as if I were on my way to something good. And as soon as I felt it, it began to disintegrate.
I read and reviewed that book. I was ultimately easier on it than Watman, partly because, in my experience, the feeling he nicely describes here survived the encroachments of the novel's faults. But the interesting thing is that while I felt just this sense of the novel's force, it never occurred to me to simply describe that. Instead I spent a lot of words trying to pinpoint what was producing it. That's a necessary and usually productive exercise, but it's also nice to find a reviewer simply reporting the impression. It's all too easy to skip over that step in the throes of analysis.
In fact, I've been skipping over it throughout this post, so let me back up, take a hint from Mr. Watman, and simply say: when I read his work, I feel a sense of delight and engagement. There. I feel I've grown as a critic today.
Also covered in Watman's piece are the following titles:
• E.L. Doctorow, The March: "In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That’s what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March.…Doctorow’s characters are as flat as photographs, and a book made of snapshots is nothing. War is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people, and unfortunately there are no people in Doctorow’s book."
• Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park: "The whole book swirls, surreally, pushing the limits of tolerable confusion while sending up laughably familiar horror story shticks. For a while, it looks as if nothing will be resolved. It works precisely because it is a ghost story, replete with eviscerated livestock, freshly dug graves, and messages written in ash—and because everything, ultimately, is resolved."
• Rick Moody, The Diviners: "Why would anyone even bother to type the words 'imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights'?"
• Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision, in a moment of reviewing the reviewers: "I may be unable to get out of my own postmodern/ironic way, but it seems that everyone has mistaken Kunkel for the character of his own creation. And while that doesn’t make his creation any more palatable, it is the best tribute to a first-person novel I can think of."
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, November 18, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Half-sister act
Time again for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I covered three shows this week—The Woman in White, Bach in Leipzig, and the Classic Stage Company’s Hamlet—and my guess is that you’re going to be surprised by my reaction to the first of them. I sure was:
Andrew Lloyd Webber, once the infallible cash machine of big-budget musical comedy, lost his touch a decade ago and has been AWOL from Broadway ever since. Now he’s back—in both senses—with “The Woman in White,” a stage version of Wilkie Collins’ 1860 shocker about two half-sisters (Maria Friedman and Jill Paice) who fall into the clutches of a murderous pair of swindling noblemen (Ron Bohmer and Michael Ball). Ms. Friedman, who underwent breast-cancer surgery two weeks ago, returned to the show last Thursday in a front-page display of true grit. No less newsworthy, though, is Mr. Lloyd Webber’s own return to form. Not only is “The Woman in White” a solid three-base hit, but for much of its length it proves to be a highly impressive piece of musical theater as well.
Not being a fan of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s high-priced brand of kitsch, I confess to having been taken aback by the first act of “The Woman of White,” whose witty domestic tone suggests a cross between “Pride and Prejudice” and “Dracula.” Far more than merely fluent, it is at once beautifully paced and unabashedly operatic in scale (so much so that the canned sound of the synthesizer-laden, overly loud pit orchestra does the score a great disservice). The second act, alas, is less memorable—Mr. Lloyd Webber’s big tunes, here as ever, are too obvious to be distinguished—but it holds together dramatically, and though I came away with an unmistakable sense of missed opportunities, “The Woman in White” is still an exceedingly well-made entertainment that will send you home sated….
If you like super-smart silliness, head downtown to the New York Theatre Workshop and be ready to laugh until your ribs are sore. Comparisons between Itamar Moses’ “Bach at Leipzig” and Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” are inevitable—indeed, Mr. Stoppard wrote the preface to the published version of his younger colleague’s play—but the good news is that Mr. Moses is up to the challenge. In “Bach in Leipzig” he takes a typically Stoppardian historical situation (seven famous organists auditioning for the same high-profile church job in 18th-century Leipzig) and turns it into a who’s-on-first farce full of theatrical trickery and fizzy verbal slapstick….
Michael Cumpsty, lately of “The Constant Wife,” is one of those ultra-reliable craftsmen whose name on a program always makes me perk up. Now he’s given us something much finer than mere craftsmanship: a Classic Stage Company production of “Hamlet” in which he turns in a thoroughly superior performance of the title role….
No link, as usual. To read the whole thing, of which there’s a bit more than usual (the Journal kindly gave me extra space this week), buy a copy of this morning’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, an incredible and insufficiently appreciated bargain.
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TT: Rerun
October 2003:
I don’t blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren’t especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can’t imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked—the glossy "symphonic score" beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties—in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that’s the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he’s most comfortable.
That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter…
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Payment made to Benjamin Britten by the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1939 to support the writing of Peter Grimes: $1,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,120.80
(Source: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography)
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TT: Almanac
When a girl would catch a fine lad,
She’ll need one weapon to disarm him:
She must charm him,
And then never take her glance off him.
She won’t need a ruffly gown
Nor velvet shoulders to get him.
Once she’s met him,
She just has to charm the pants off him.
Some girls have charm for all,
Some girls have charm for few,
But when a girl has charm for none,
There’s not very much that she can do.
And so I fear that I may be stuck
In this same dreary situation,
Maiden station,
Passed up by every lad
Unless I find some charm
I didn’t know I had.
William Roy, “Charm” (music by Roy)
| Thursday, November 17, 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)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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)
• See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 17, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Combined advance paid to Ernest Hemingway by Scribner’s in 1926 for The Sun Also Rises and The Torrents of Spring: $1,500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $15,849.36
(Source: Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 17, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure."
Charles Baudelaire, Journal intime
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 17, 2005 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 16, 2005
OGIC: Links for misanthropes
I didn't plan it this way, but all the links I've hoarded lately seem to fit that description. They're also all from last week because I am living in the past.
Ross at The American Scene makes the case for an HBO White House drama:
It struck me that there's an opening for a show that gives our nation's capital the real HBO treatment--not the "Steven Soderbergh filming flacks with a handheld camera" approach, I mean, but the Sopranos/Deadwood/Rome approach. Start with the West Wing formula--idealistic, articulate people working in high-pressure jobs while keeping the nation's best interests close to their hearts--and shove it through the looking glass. Send an anti-hero to Washington, and follow him (or her) up the ladder, all the way to the Presidency (if he's a politician) or the Karl Rove role (if he's an operative). Make the characters twisted, depraved, power-hungry, sexually voracious, occasionally violent--and make them appealing, too. Give us Deadwood at the Palm, the Sopranos with their hands on the nuclear football, Rome in the capital of the modern Roman Empire.
Outer Life stars in his own tale of--well, just go read it. I can't possibly do it justice and might well wreck it. Be prepared to laugh at the misfortunes of another, is all I'll say.
At Cathy's World, Cathy Seipp's pal Sandra Tsing Loh chips in a magnificent rant. The object of her righteous ire? PEN USA:
So. . . I was excited about the PEN Awards and marked my calendar. Then at my writer's group meeting yesterday, I asked my friend Samantha Dunn if she was going. She had indeed been honored with a gracious invite to join the table of David Ulin, but snorted a remark along the lines of: "$250? I ain't got it!"
This gave me pause. Then I went to the PEN website, and realized, in good conscience, what was I thinking? I really cannot go!
In fact, if I had the babysitting I would be standing in front of the Biltmore in a placard literally PROTESTING this event.
Loh is as funny on paper as on the air, plus the sailor in her gets a furlough.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
"Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy."
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: All over the place (cont'd)
As a rule, New York drama critics are admitted only to those Broadway shows to which they’re formally invited, which usually means a press preview just prior to opening night. (Sometimes we’re asked back later in the run to cover a major cast change.) Because I go to the theater so often, and because tickets cost so much, it’s very unusual for me to see a play more than once, whereas I normally see a film at least twice if I really like it. Until last Saturday, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was the only show I’d paid to see again since I started covering theater for The Wall Street Journal two and a half years ago. Well, not only did I do the same thing for Sweeney Todd, but I ordered my tickets immediately after coming home from the press preview. That’s how good I thought it was—and I felt the same way on Saturday. So did Ms. In the Wings, who was all but jumping up and down with excitement when the curtain fell at evening's end. “I could see it again right now!” she said as we filed out of the theater.
I knew just what she meant. John Doyle’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece is so powerfully individual that you feel as if you’re seeing the show anew, no matter how well you think you know it—and I know Sweeney Todd very well indeed, having written about it in detail in A Terry Teachout Reader. I know some people, and even a few critics, have found the production disappointingly modest in scale, but I’m damned if I can see why that should stop them from appreciating the sheer audacity of Doyle’s concept, or the overwhelming punch with which his perfect cast brings it to life.
• I finally started revving the engine down on Sunday, having hit all four of my accumulated deadlines and taken all but one of my scheduled out-of-town business trips through the end of 2005. (I’m going to Baltimore on Saturday afternoon to see Centerstage’s production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, but that’s strictly a low-pressure overnight jaunt complete with relaxing train ride.) I brunched with a friend’s little sister at the Acme Bar and Grill (mmmm, cheese grits) and took her to a New York Theatre Workshop matinee of Bach in Leipzig, then spent the rest of the day blogging, straightening pictures, and trying to unwind, not very successfully. If only my sleep cycle would right itself at once after all that stress! Alas, it’ll take at least a week of sensible living, if not two, before I’m sleeping and breathing regularly again.
• I can’t remember the last time I took an entire weekday off without leaving the city (or getting sick), but Ms. In the Wings, unlikely as it may sound, had never before paid a proper visit to New York City, so I devoted the whole of Monday to showing her the town, albeit in an idiosyncratic, low-keyed way.
After a leisurely lunch at Café Lalo, we paid a visit to Zabar’s to browse among the smoked fish and cheese, then strolled through Central Park, where we rode two kinds of horses. Next was the Guggenheim Museum and two thought-provoking hours' worth of Russian art (about which much more later). From there we caught a cab to Grand Central Station and sipped cocktails at the Campbell Apartment, giggling wildly as we pretended to be haute something-or-other. Last came a long, utterly satisfying dinner at Blue Hill, during which we talked and talked and talked. Once in a while I’d catch myself thinking how nice it was not to be working, or worrying about work, but mostly I just surrendered to the passing moment, reveling in the company of my visitor and wondering why I don’t do this sort of thing more often.
And that’s my story: a madly hectic week and a half of writing, travel, and art, capped by a perfectly happy Monday in my adopted home town. On Tuesday I went to the gym and did no work of any kind. Instead, I stuck close to home, called my mother, sent out for Vietnamese food, watched The Apartment on TV, and kept reminding myself that it takes more than one day for a middle-aged workaholic to recover from his prolonged and excessive labors.
I’m not there yet, or even close, but at least I’m on my way.
* * *
(Go here for the first installment and here for the second.)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Temporary insanity
O.K., it's not that bad, but I don't have quite enough steam left in the boiler to write and post the concluding installment of "All Over the Place" before bedtime. It'll have to wait.
In lieu of same, I've posted four new Top Fives to divert you. Much, much more tomorrow.
First, though, a word from Morpheus....
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Fee paid to Neil Simon by Paramount in 1965 for film rights to The Odd Couple: $400,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,383,255.82
(Source: Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"François Truffaut defined a great movie as a perfect blend of truth and spectacle. Now it's become bifurcated. Studio films are all spectacle and no truth, and independent films are all truth and no spectacle."
Howard Franklin (quoted in Joe Morgenstern, “Hollywood’s Gambling Problem,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 12, 2005)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 16, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 15, 2005
TT: All over the place (cont'd)
• On Saturday I flew down to Winston-Salem, where Carolina Ballet was giving three performances of Robert Weiss’ Swan Lake (it was premiered last season in Raleigh, but I was too busy covering Broadway openings to come see it).
The standard four-act version of Swan Lake, choreographed in 1895 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is too large in scale to be performed by medium-smallish companies. Weiss had long taken for granted that it was beyond the reach of Carolina Ballet, which employs only thirty-two dancers, until he ran across a children’s-book version of Swan Lake by the Viennese author-illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger in which the story of the ballet is turned into a fairy tale. Reading the book showed him how Swan Lake could be reconceived on an intimate, organically smaller scale. Zwerger gave him permission to use her Schwanensee as the basis for his production, and now Carolina Ballet has its very own two-act Swan Lake, one with just eight swan maidens instead of the usual twenty-four.
Weiss’ Swan Lake is forty-five minutes shorter than the Petipa-Ivanov version and has been altered in a variety of other ways, some small and some significant (among other things, it has a happy ending, Tchaikovsky’s original intention). Above all, it's been completely rechoreographed in the fast-moving manner of Weiss' other full-evening story ballets. As I explained a couple of years ago in a Washington Post review of his dance version of Carmen:
If you hadn't seen any full-length ballets other than, say, "Giselle," you probably wouldn't notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren't any boring parts—and that's the point.
Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson's "Dracula" (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I've lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux-romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself. The results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.
Weiss has chosen a different model for "Carmen," as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful "Romeo and Juliet" that Carolina Ballet premiered last year. Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine's 1962 adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. "I don't like seeing a lot of people standing around on stage doing nothing," Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet….He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but always to make specific narrative points.
As a result, Weiss’ Swan Lake, though related to the standard Petipa-Ivanov version, doesn’t feel anything like a slimmed-down alternative. It's different not only in scale but also in shape and tone, and to my mind is wholly successful on its own terms. I saw it twice and couldn’t have been more impressed. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of Weiss’ version, it strikes me that he’s found a solution to the Swan Lake problem that other regional companies with similarly limited resources would do well to embrace.
• I took Ms. Pratie Place to the Sunday matinee, about which she blogged at length last week, complete with illustrations. It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful day, so we had brunch at an outdoor café next to the theater in Winston-Salem and chatted about everything under the sun. (We’d been in touch via e-mail for some time, but this was our first meeting.) Ms. Pratie, a folk musician who lives in Chapel Hill and looks a bit like Emmylou Harris, is a peach, spunky and smart and wonderfully receptive, and had I not been planning to fly back to New York that same evening, I would have been more than happy to dine with her after the ballet as well.
• Alas, the weather in New York caught me flat-footed. Late-breaking thunderstorms rendered LaGuardia inoperative, forcing me to spend the night in a grouchy little airport hotel in Greenboro. By then the accumulated stress of the week just past had rendered me inoperative, too, so I dined unmemorably in a nearby sports bar and spent the night sitting up in bed watching TV. (Warning: The Matrix is not suitable for viewing by the severely underslept.)
• The skies finally righted themselves on Monday, and I flew back to New York that morning. No sooner did I unlock the door of the Teachout Museum than I plunged into four hellish days of work, none of which I’d be willing to repeat save at gunpoint. I wrote four tough pieces back to back: two columns for The Wall Street Journal, a review of Marion Rodgers’ Mencken: The American Iconoclast for The New Criterion, and an essay for the fiftieth-anniversary issue of National Review. In between deadlines, I chewed up a ton of snail mail, went to previews of Souvenir and Classic Stage Company’s Hamlet, and blogged about how I was either too tired or too wired to sleep—I forget which.
• My frenzied activity finally came to a halt on Friday night when I fell into bed and slept as though drugged. The next morning I tidied up the apartment and went out to meet Ms. In the Wings, who was visiting New York for the first time and had put her itinerary in my hands. In case you’re wondering, she's just like her blog: fey, funny, and forever saying slightly off-center things that make earthbound types like me feel hopelessly wonkish and unfanciful.
I gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum, after which we went to the Neue Galerie to have a snack in the oh-so-Viennese café and look over the Egon Schiele retrospective (very impressive, but that man was one way sick cookie). Then we strolled back across Central Park, dined at Kitchen 82, and went down to Broadway to catch the new revival of Sweeney Todd, she for the first time, I for the second. All I’d told her in advance was that we’d be seeing something cool, and when the cab pulled up in front of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, she agreed—not calmly—that I hadn’t been exaggerating.
(To be continued)
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TT: And damned well about time, too
From DVD Journal:
New from our friends at The Criterion Collection are four titles, all due in February. Jean Renoir's 1938 La Bête Humaine will feature a new transfer of the original, uncut version, along with an introduction from Renoir, a new interview with Peter Bogdanovich, additional archive interviews with Renoir, stills, and a trailer (Feb. 14). Luis Buñuel's controversial 1961 comedy Viridiana will feature an interview with author and journalist Richard Porton, as well as a trailer and an essay by film historian Michael Wood (Feb. 14). Robert Hamer's 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets starring Alec Guinness updates the previous Anchor Bay DVD release with two BBC programmes on Guinness and the history of Ealing Studios, stills, a trailer, and an essay by critic and historian Philip Kemp (Feb. 28). And finally, Whit Stillman's 1990 Metropolitan will offer a commentary from the director, editor Christopher Tellefsen, and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols, outtakes and deleted scenes, and an essay from film scholar Luc Sante (Feb. 28). Also stay tuned for early 2006, when Orson Welles' 1955 Mr. Arkadin is expected to arrive under the Criterion folio.
My birthday is (ahem) February 6.
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TT: Number, please
• William Holden’s fee in 1957 (plus ten percent of the profits) for playing in The Bridge on the River Kwai: $300,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,038,819.84
(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)
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TT: Almanac
Time is a very strange thing.
So long as one takes it for granted, it is nothing at all.
But then, all of a sudden, one is aware of nothing else.
It is all about us, it is within us also,
In our faces it is there, trickling,
In the mirror it is there, trickling,
In my sleep it is there, flowing,
And between me and you,
There, too, it flows, soundless, like an hour-glass.
Oh, Quinquin, sometimes I hear it flowing
Irresistibly on.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
And stop all the clocks, all, all of them.
Nevertheless, we are not to shrink from it,
For it, too, is a creature of the Father who created us all.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier (music by Richard Strauss, trans. W.H. Auden)
| Monday, November 14, 2005
TT: All over the place
That’s the phrase dancers use to describe a performance that is…well, a bit erratic. It’s one of my favorite pieces of professional argot, not to mention a pretty good way to sum up the past week and a half. I’ve been all over the place, seen all sorts of things, written far too many pieces, and hung out with some of my favorite people—including two bloggers whom I was meeting for the first time, even though I already “knew” them well from cyberspace.
Here are some snapshots from the maelstrom:
• It all started two Wednesdays ago when I went to a press preview of Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, a new jukebox musical that I loathed, very much in contrast to the collective opinion of the audience and—as it turned out—most of my colleagues.
No, I didn’t care for the music, but that’s not the main thing wrong with the show. After all, I don’t like the music in Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do, either, but I adored the movie. So what’s the problem? I’ll start with an e-mail that a smart friend sent to me after reading my review:
my youth in the mid-60s was spent at jones beach with other families who had very little, eating pb&j sandwiches with ears pressed to transistor radios radio counting down the top 20. the four seasons were nyc's stick-ball answer to the beatles and the beach boys and the energy level was very new york back then (63-68-ish). the four seasons compared to the beatles and beach boys was almost race music. it was pure subway. now, with sinatra dead and tony all but a wax museum piece (when was he not), seems valli is perfectly poised to become the patron saint of all things mall….
Jersey Boys tells you all this, but it doesn’t show you any of it, because it isn’t a play but a string of first-person monologues separated by occasional stretches of stilted dialogue (just like Lennon, which was even worse). That’s why it’s so dead on stage. Even a one-person show, which in a sense is all in the telling, has to find a way to break free of mere narration—otherwise it never comes to life. There’s a reason why we call a show a show.
• On Thursday morning I arose at 4:45 and caught a six a.m. train to Washington for the winter meeting of the National Council on the Arts, which began at nine. I slept all the way down and arrived on time (well, almost).
Our closed sessions are strictly confidential, so I can’t tell you anything about what we discussed on Thursday. Instead, I’ll fast-forward to the Washington Ballet performance I attended that evening at Kennedy Center, accompanied by my friend Ali. She’d never seen George Balanchine’s Serenade, which opened the program. I looked at her when it was over, and I'm fairly sure I saw a tear or two. Then she smiled. “Couldn’t we just see that one twice more instead of the other pieces on the program?” she asked. I know how she felt. I remember my first Serenade, which I saw eighteen years ago from the cheap seats of New York’s City Center, courtesy of Dance Theatre of Harlem. It had the same effect on me. It has the same effect on everyone.
• The next morning I returned to the Old Post Office to join my fellow council members for a public session. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, always makes sure that our meetings include some kind of performance—even if it’s nothing more than the playing of a suitable record—so we started the day by listening to Louis Armstrong’s 1933 recording of Basin Street Blues, thereby paying tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the determination of the survivors to bring art back to New Orleans. It was a lovely, utterly appropriate moment.
Midway through the meeting we paused to make the acquaintance of Wayne Henderson, a guitar maker from a very small town in Virginia (pop. 7, or so he says) who is the subject of Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, a new book by Allen St. John. Henderson, a short, shy, unassuming man, is an NEA National Heritage Fellow. He played “Wildwood Flower” and “Black Mountain Rag” on one of his own handmade guitars, and as I listened, I delighted in the fact that my government had had the wisdom to pay official homage to so deserving an artisan.
At meeting’s end Dana noted the death of Shirley Horn, one of last year’s NEA Jazz Fellows, who had been buried the day before in Washington. Then we listened in silence to her recording of “If You Love Me.” The silence grew thick as an early-morning fog as she sang the last verse:
When at last our life on earth is through,
I will share eternity with you.
If you love me, really love me,
Let it happen, I won't care.
I was thinking about the haircut I’d gotten in New York earlier in the week. The barber tied a dark blue apron around my neck, and it seemed as if all the freshly trimmed hair falling on it was either gray or white. So here it is at last, the distinguished thing, I told myself with an invisible shrug of pretended indifference to the all too visible evidence of the downward slope. Of course there are worse things than being on the verge of your fiftieth birthday—starting, needless to say, with the alternative—but that doesn’t make it any cheerier to contemplate, or easier to explain to younger friends still full of great expectations and innocent of grim foreknowledge. In middle age you find yourself saying goodbye to all that, a dream at a time, until one day the winds grow colder/And suddenly you’re older….
“The one hundred fifty-sixth meeting of the National Council on the Arts is now adjourned,” Dana said softly, and banged his gavel once. A half-hour later I was on a train bound for New York.
• A few hours after that, I was sitting on the aisle at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater, getting ready to watch Propeller perform Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, accompanied by another young friend who was unexpectedly understanding of the night thoughts churning around inside the head of a tired critic with miles to go before he slept.
“Omigod, Terry, you look awful,” she said. “Aren't you getting any sleep? Are you going to make it through the week in one piece?”
“Oh, sure. I always do, don't I? I have this, you know,” I replied, waving one hand at the stage. “It's what I live off. It’s just about the only illusion you get to hang onto. Friends die, marriages end, staircases grow steeper—but we still have that perfect world down there, and we can live in it for a couple of hours at a time. You'd be surprised how much it helps.”
All at once I heard Shirley Horn’s soft, slow, thick-grained voice in my mind’s ear, and sighed. “Ah, Elly, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“Kind of,” she said, putting her unlined hand atop mine and giving it a comforting pat.
(To be continued)
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TT: Live and in three persons
On December 6, I’ll be teaming up with Maud Newton (lovingly known around these parts as Supermaud) and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker (whom I’ve never met, weirdly enough) for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is “The Art of Online Criticism.”
Says the press release:
Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone's a critic.
Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.
For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.
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TT: Rerun
October 2003:
I’m not saying that all good new art has to be simple, or that I only like simple art. Nor am I saying that all great art is destined in time to be swallowed up and spit out by Madison Avenue. But as I grow older, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the long-term viability of self-consciously "difficult" art. This is part of what I meant when I observed a little earlier today that the first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. Of course it is our reciprocal responsibility to be open to the new. What seems strange now may soon come to seem beautiful—but I very much doubt that a lifetime’s puzzling over Finnegans Wake will cause it to seem anything other than pointlessly complex. There’s a reason why the greatest artists dissolve into simplicity as they grow older.…
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Alec Guinness’ fee in 1976 (plus two percent of the producer's profit) for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: $150,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $514,978.46
(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)
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TT: Almanac
"In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain."
V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
| Friday, November 19, 2004
TT: Just another day in New York City
I lunched on Wednesday with a friend of mine who recently went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, whose brand-new midtown headquarters will be opened to the public tomorrow. The flu had laid me too low to attend any of the preceding week's press previews, so when she asked me if I’d like to take a quick peek at the galleries, I was—well, torn. I was worn out from a hard night's book-plugging and knew I really needed to go home and grab a nap, but I couldn’t imagine passing up a chance to see the new MoMA before the crowds arrived, so I took a deep breath and said, “You bet. Let’s go.”
No doubt every art and architecture critic in the known universe will be holding forth this week and next about MoMA. (The New York Times even has a special page on its Web site devoted to the opening.) Opinions published to date range from the ecstatic to the apocalyptic. For my part, I feel neither inclined nor qualified to lay down the law based on a single brisk walkthrough. The new MoMA is going to be around for a long time, and my feelings about it will evolve each time I come back to see it again. The sheer bigness of the public areas, for instance, struck me as offputting at first glance. “This’d be a great place for a roller derby,” I told my friend as we entered the first-floor lobby. But I realized in the next breath that they’d look different—radically so—once they were filled to capacity with excited museumgoers, and immediately resolved to suspend judgment.
Most of the artbloggers who’ve written about MoMA have concentrated on the contemporary galleries and their contents. (Modern Art Notes is posting fresh links on a regular basis.) I was more interested in how MoMA’s “narrative” of the development of modernism had been revisited and reshaped by John Elderfield and his team of curators. Again, my reactions are strictly provisional, but here are some of the things that struck me as I sprinted through the galleries for the first time:
• In the old MoMA, Picasso was the big cheese. Now it’s Matisse. (Suits me.)
• Visitors to the old MoMA had only one way to experience the unfolding of modernism: in a sequence carefully controlled by the entrances and exits to the successive galleries. The new floor plan, by contrast, is much more open. MoMA still tells a highly idiosyncratic "story" about modern art, but you can read the chapters in whatever order you choose.
• In the old MoMA, prewar American modernists were all but ignored, except for the ones whose work either related to European surrealism (Joseph Cornell) or prefigured abstract expressionism (Milton Avery). Nor were such postwar representationalists as Fairfield Porter given the time of day. Alas, nothing has changed. Justin Davidson and Ariella Budick nailed it in their Newsday review:
Every museum has its omissions, but MoMA's disregard for Americans who don't fit the official line is all the more breathtaking because of the building's scope. Two floors of painting and sculpture are still not ample enough to include Fairfield Porter, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Philip Pearlstein, or Alex Katz. Even Larry Rivers' "Washington Crossing the Delaware," one of the museum's marquee paintings, is absent.
These omissions are all the more striking to me in light of the fact that my own collection of works on paper by American artists focuses on precisely those artists whom MoMA fails to take seriously. I originally conceived of the “Teachout Museum” as a kind of counter-canon of American modernism—a reply to MoMA, so to speak. The fact that the old MoMA was too small to exhibit more than a fraction of its vast holdings made me wonder whether the new MoMA might possibly be planning to rethink its cramped view of American art before 1945. No such luck. At least for now, Elderfield & Co. haven’t even tried.
• If you want to sum up MoMA’s occasional fits of provincialism in a single sentence, you could do worse than this one: it owns at least four major Morandis, but none of them is on view.
• One of the best things a smart curator can do is hang works of art together in such a way as to make you say, Wow! I never thought of that. The new MoMA offers more than a few such double-take moments. The gallery devoted to minimalism, for instance, also contains a large circle painting by Kenneth Noland. To see it hanging across the room from a Donald Judd sculpture is eye-opening in the best possible way. Likewise the now-notorious stairwell in which Matisse’s "La Danse" looks down on Avery’s “Sea Grasses and Blue Sea” (which used to hang next to the cloakroom!) and a Richard Diebenkorn “Ocean Park” canvas. No, I don’t like the way the Matisse is hung, not one little bit—it's cute, if you know what I mean—but I love the juxtaposition.
A thought-provoking afternoon, in short, and I was bone-tired when I headed for home, got on my back for a couple of hours, then cabbed down to the theater district to hear the Phil Woods Quintet
at Birdland, an event I'd been eagerly awaiting for weeks.
Woods is one of those jazz musicians who is extravagantly admired by his peers without ever having enjoyed the general acclaim he deserves (except for the too-brief period in the Seventies when he sat in on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” and Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu” and recorded under his own name for RCA). He is that rarity of rarities, a second-generation bebop saxophonist who learned the lessons of Charlie Parker without choking on them, and now that he’s reached the threshold of old age, his playing is purer and more compelling than ever. Yes, Woods is still hot enough to burn a hole in a girder, but the hard-edged style of his youthful days has given way to a warmer, richer sound—perhaps he picked up a touch of Benny Carter somewhere along the way. Of course he’s also a great virtuoso, one of the greatest in jazz, but you never get the feeling that he’s showing off: everything is casual, even offhand, as though he were playing for a roomful of friends.
It doesn't hurt that Woods has been working with the same bassist and drummer, Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodwin, for thirty years. To say all three of them are on the same page is the blandest of understatements—they finish each other’s sentences—and trumpeter Brian Lynch, who joined the group in 1992, fits in no less seamlessly. Among a thousand other things, I love the way they rely on only the most minimal amplification, letting their individual sounds blend naturally in the air. (Microphones have always been a formality for the mammoth-toned Woods.) As for Bill Charlap, who signed on in 1995 and has continued to appear with the quintet from time to time even after his own career mushroomed, I simply can’t say enough good things about him, try though I do; I go to hear Charlap as often as possible, and he never fails to spin my head around. On Wednesday he did it with a solo version of David Raksin’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” that sounded as if he were breathing into an Aeolian harp instead of caressing the keys of Birdland’s Cadillac-sized Bösendorfer grand.
I first heard Phil Woods in person in 1979 from a distance of about five feet, back in the days when he looked like the hippest of hipsters. (Now he looks more like the partner of a film-noir detective, the guy who gets popped in the first reel.) He came to Kansas City to perform with my college jazz band, and since our saxophonists couldn’t cut all of his charts, he did several tunes with the rhythm section alone. I was the bass player that night, and I was so scared that I needed a diaper, but Woods smoothed the way with his kindness and generosity, and I ended up playing way over my head. After the gig, I asked him to autograph my copy of Live at the Showboat, the 1977 double album that had put him on the map. “Good playing with you,” he scrawled. I haven’t kept very many souvenirs in my life, but I still have that album.
As I mentioned yesterday, I brought Sarah to Birdland with me. I'd been wanting to make up for the truly awful play to which I’d subjected her the last time she was in town, and since Sarah is one of the most sharp-eared civilians I know (among other things, she spotted the quote from Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” cadenza that Brian Lynch tossed into an original blues), I thought a night at Birdland might possibly even the score. We’d both been struggling with viruses, but no sooner did the band kick off “A Foggy Day” than the music pulled us out of ourselves and we forgot all about being sick.
The very first thing
I wrote about on this blog was a Central Park concert by Luciana Souza
and the New York Philharmonic. “Nights like this,” I said, “are why you live in a preshrunk apartment and pay outrageous rent and grope around to make sure your wallet's still there every time you get off a crowded subway car. Feel free to remind me the next time you catch me griping about New York.” The miracle of New York City is that such occasions are far from uncommon; I’ve written about more than a few of them in the past year. Still, Wednesday was special even by the exalted standards to which I’ve become accustomed. I hope the day never comes when I take my charmed life for granted. I doubt it ever will.
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TT: Sound bite
You may not know that Condoleezza Rice is a serious amateur pianist (she’s good enough to have played in public with Yo-Yo Ma a couple of years ago). In light of this posting, I thought I’d pass along a fascinating quote from a profile
of Rice that appeared in Wednesday's New York Times:
I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured. And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves.
I myself take a different view of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff (though not Brahms), but it’s obvious that our incoming Secretary of State has strong and coherent musical opinions. I’d love to sit down and chat with her about them one of these days….
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TT: One show only
This is your final warning: I'll be appearing tonight at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, to talk about All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. My illustrious interlocutor is Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.
The show starts at six o’clock, but do come early so that you can get a leisurely look at “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” which tells the story of a great museum’s involvement with dance in the Thirties. The galleries close at five p.m., which gives you plenty of time to grab a bite to eat, come back, and watch us perform.
For more information, go here.
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TT: Talking shops
Time again for my Wall Street Journal drama column. The Broadway previews are coming hot and heavy this month and next, and today I wrote about three high-profile shows, none of which knocked me out, though my unenthusiastic review of Democracy cut sharply and (for me, anyway) unexpectedly against the conventional wisdom:
Once or twice a season, Broadway makes room for a play, usually an import, that gets tagged by the press as egghead-friendly. Last spring it was “Jumpers,” and now it’s Michael Frayn’s “Democracy,” which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. A huge hit in London, “Democracy” has been transplanted to New York in Michael Blakemore’s original National Theatre production, but with a new, all-American cast led by James Naughton and Richard Thomas. It is, as advertised, smart and thoughtful, and if good intentions counted for anything in the theater, “Democracy” would be a great play. But they don’t, and it isn’t.
Like Mr. Frayn’s “Copenhagen,” “Democracy” is a fictionalized docudrama. It tells how Willy Brandt (Mr. Naughton), the first left-wing chancellor of West Germany, was forced out of office when it was disclosed that Günter Guillaume (Mr. Thomas), his personal assistant, was in fact an East German secret agent. The play is about the complex relationship between the two men, but since Mr. Frayn has chosen to give it a real-life setting, we also hear from Guillaume’s Stasi controller (Michael Cumpsty) and seven of Brandt’s colleagues, who discuss the ins and outs of West German politics at squirm-making length. In addition, Guillaume spends far too much time speaking directly to his controller, often switching hats in mid-sentence. The results are at once cluttered and static: Everybody talks, but nothing happens….
Nor was I much impressed with The Good Body:
Eve Ensler, the author of “The Vagina Monologues,” is moving up in the world: Her new play is about stomachs.
“The Good Body,” which runs through Jan. 16 at the Booth Theatre, is a monologue about Ms. Ensler’s midriff and how she learned to live with it, just as you can live with yours, assuming you’re a woman who hates the way she thinks she looks...
The real trouble with her show is twofold. In the first place, it’s not exactly stop-press news that lots of women are neurotic about their bodies, meaning that long stretches of “The Good Body” sound like “Bridget Jones’ Diary” recycled. Furthermore, Ms. Ensler, who identifies herself as a “radical feminist” on the second page of the script, spends the next hour and a half whining à la Woody Allen about her own neuroses. Only at the very end does she assure us—unconvincingly—that she’s finally succeeded in raising her own consciousness to the point of accepting her stomach as “the goodest part of me.” (It looks perfectly normal, by the way.) Somehow that doesn’t strike me as a compelling argument for radical feminism….
Not even Edie Falco, whom I normally adore, was capable of ringing my bell with her performance in the new revival of Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-winning ’night, Mother:
Ms. Falco plays a depressed, epileptic small-town Midwesterner who spends virtually the whole of the play explaining to her mother (Brenda Blethlyn) why her life is no longer worth living (“Maybe if there was something I really liked, like maybe if I really liked rice pudding or cornflakes for breakfast or something, that might be enough”), then locks herself in her bedroom and blows her brains out. Even if I found this scenario plausible, I’d expect the women in question to be presented with at least a moderate amount of subtlety, whereas Ms. Falco and Ms. Blethlyn play their parts flatly and uninvolvingly, accents and all. When first-class actors are so far off the mark, chances are that the director is to blame, and the track record of Michael Mayer, most recently seen on Broadway as the perpetrator-in-chief of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s’s atrocious revival of “After the Fall,” doesn’t inspire confidence….
No link, so if you’ve a mind to read the whole thing, go buy a paper, or (much better yet) go here to subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the best bargains in newspaperdom.
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TT: Almanac
BARRY: I want to date a musician.
ROB: I want to live with a musician. She could write songs at home, ask me what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our private jokes in the liner notes.
BARRY: Maybe a little picture of me in the liner notes.
DICK: Just in the background somewhere.
D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, and Scott Rosenberg, screenplay for High Fidelity
| Thursday, November 18, 2004
TT: ...and live to blog another day
This was a day made for blogging. Not only did I get an unexpected sneak peek at the new Museum of Modern Art, but I spent the evening at Birdland listening to the Phil Woods Quintet, with Bill Charlap sitting in on piano. That’s an only-in-New-York story raised to the umpteenth power.
Alas, I’m still a few feet under the weather, as is Sarah, who met me at Birdland and was duly blown away by Woods and company. Seeing as how we both have time-consuming stuff on our plates tomorrow (Sarah is sitting on a panel with Maud, while I have to write a speech in the morning and give it in the evening), we decided to be mature, sensible adults and hang it up early.
Actually, it was Sarah who was mature and sensible. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed up half the night writing and paid the price tomorrow, but she set me straight.
“Should I blog tonight, or should I go to bed?” I asked her in the cab after the gig.
She looked at me with open-mouthed horror. “Are you kidding?” she replied, all but wagging a stern finger in my face. “Go home and go to bed. You can write this up on Friday—if then.”
I knew when I was licked. I have lots and lots of thoughts to share with you, but they’ll keep until Friday—or longer.
In the meantime, the Phil Woods Quintet is at Birdland through Saturday. If you’re loose, go. If you’re not, get that way. If you can’t, order this album and eat your heart out.
Later.
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 18, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Guest almanac
“'I want to influence people so they’ll do what I think it’s important they should do. I can’t get ’em to do that unless I let ’em bore me first, you understand. Then just as they’re delighting in having got me punch-drunk with talk I come back at ’em and make ’em do what I’ve got lined up for ’em.’
“’I wish I could do that,’ Dixon said enviously. ‘When I’m punch-drunk with talk, which is what I am most of the time, that’s when they come at me and make me do what they want me to do.’ Apprehension and drink combined to break through another bulkhead in his mind and he went on eagerly: ‘I’m the boredom detector. I’m a finely tuned instrument. If only I could get hold of a millionaire I’d be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktail parties and night clubs, just for five minutes, and then by looking at me he’d be able to read off the boredom coefficient of any gathering. Like a canary down a coal mine; same idea.’”
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (courtesy of Modern Kicks)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, November 18, 2004 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, November 17, 2004
OGIC: The five hundred twenty
In the comments over at Mad Max Perkins's excellent newish publishing-insider blog, commenter Marjorie offers this startling perspective:
By my reckoning, I read about two books a month. (It used to be more, but children have an odd way of needing a lot of attention.)
My financial adviser informs me that I must die when I am 87 because I will run out of money at that point. So, assuming she is right, at two books a month I will read only 520 books more in my lifetime. Do I want to waste one of those precious allotments on an award-winning book that I find neither enjoyable nor enlightening? I do not.
Screw the awards and their fallible human judges. I start with reviews and word-of-mouth. Then I go to the book jacket and read a page or two at the bookstore or on Amazon. Then I buy it and give it 50 pages. If I'm not laughing, crying, or learning something by page 50, out it goes, guilt-free. Life is too short to read a book that doesn't give me something in return for my time, energy, and money.
520: astonishingly finite and sobering, that figure. I'm reminded of last year, when the Booker Prize went to a book I'd never heard of by a writer also unknown to me. On impulse, I ducked into a bookstore on my way home the day of the announcement and bought a cloth copy of D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little. I would never get beyond chapter 2. So at least I still had my time, save a few minutes. But had I held off and read a few of the reviews that soon followed, I would also still have that particular $20. Whoops.
My own expected number of books-yet-to-be-read is higher than 520. But that doesn't make it any less stark, wherever it may fall. This is why I want to know if Critic X didn't think a book was the best of the year as reputed, and why I don't want critics to pull their punches. It doesn't mean I implicitly trust any one critic's judgment (well, maybe Wood's, tried and true), but, like Marjorie, I do want as much varied input as possible, and I want critics to write with readers, not authors, in mind. The 2003 Booker showed me that awards committees can be every bit as fallible as critics; I hasten to add that the converse is also true. All we can ask of each is frank and searching judgment, and to please keep in mind the (shudder) 520.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: In case you think I'm a total highbrow
My new iTunes program contains a screen called "Top 25 Most Played" that tells me which songs I've listened to most frequently since I installed it. Here are the tracks at the top of the current chart:
• Erin McKeown, "A Better Wife"
• Frank Sinatra, "Witchcraft"
• George Strait, "I've Come to Expect It from You"
• Toto, "99"
• Marvin Gaye, "Got to Give It Up"
• Ahmad Jamal, "New Rhumba"
• Couperin, "The Mysterious Barricades" (played on guitar by Göran Söllscher)
• Jo Stafford, "Early Autumn"
• Suzanne Vega, "Caramel"
• Zero 7, "In the Waiting Line" (from the Garden State soundtrack, of course)
For the past couple of days, though, I've been too tired to decide what to play, so I've been putting iTunes on "shuffle play" and allowing it to supplant my free will. At the moment it's serving up Count Basie's "Jive at Five," immediately preceded by Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock."
Go figure.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: By the way
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm letting the blogmail pile up, in the hopes of finding buried treasure when I answer it all over the weekend (but mainly because I just don't have enough steam in the boiler to open it right now).
As always, thanks for your patience. I really don't like being sick, even when I'm getting better....
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Peddling the book
I just got back from my joint appearance with Bob Gottlieb and Robert Greskovic at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. It went well. The house was nearly full, the crowd asked terrific questions, and we sold and signed a pile of books afterward. One woman bought a copy of All in the Dances for her young daughter, who had School of American Ballet stamped all over her. Sure enough, it turned out that she’ll be dancing in New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker this season, so I inscribed it to “Lisa, who carries the torch.”
Her mother smiled when I handed back the book. “She won’t understand it just yet,” she said, “but someday she will.” That's a nice thought, isn't it?
I was pleased to spot several friends in the audience, among them a critic, a biographer, three musicians, and fellow bloggers Sarah
and Beatrice. Their presence buoyed me up, seeing as how my steam was already running low by the time I crawled up to the dais. Needless to say, Wednesday promises to be at least as hectic—lunch with a MoMA curator, followed by Phil Woods and Bill Charlap at Birdland, to which Sarah is accompanying me—so I’d better head for bed right now.
Don’t expect any earth-shakingly brilliant postings tomorrow. I’m nowhere near my picture-perfect best (it actually took me two hours longer than usual to write my Friday drama column this morning), so I doubt I’ll be generating any more prose until Thursday, when I have to write a speech. For the moment, I’ll be more than happy just to get another good night’s sleep.
Oh, one more thing: now that you’ve all bought my book, don’t forget to buy Bob Gottlieb’s George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. It’s good, too!
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“One of the constant minor joys of reading Trollope is coming across descriptions of little gestures which reveal character in much the same way as a good actor does, either deliberately or half-consciously. There is an example early on in The Way We Live Now in his description of Father John Barham, a young, overenthusiastic, gentlemanly Catholic priest. ‘He had thick dark brown hair, which was cut short…but which he so constantly ruffled by the action of his hands, that, although short, it seemed to be wild and uncombed…In discussions he would constantly push back his hair, and then sit with his hand fixed on the top of his head.’ I have seen many highly strung intellectuals do the same thing. The pleasure lies in recognizing, today, habits which were to be found among us a hundred and twenty years ago however much the mores and manners have changed; and a hundred years before that, and before that as well. The sense of continuity, going both backwards and forward, I find endlessly rewarding.”
Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 17, 2004 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 16, 2004
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