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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, May 19, 2006
TT: Friendly skies
I’m out of here. In a few hours I’ll be in Chicago, where Our Girl and I plan to hang out in extenso (we haven’t seen each other since January). Among other things, we’ll be seeing Chicago Shakespeare’s Henry IV marathon and the Court Theatre’s production of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, and we might catch a movie or two while we’re at it. Weekend updates are possible but not promised.
I’ll be flying back to New York on Monday, so don’t be surprised if I fail to post anything that day. In fact, blogging next week is likely to be light—I have three back-to-back deadlines, yikes! Didn’t I give you enough to read this week?
I’ll kiss the Girl for you. See you soon.
P.S. If you want to hear OGIC's Actual Speaking Voice, go here.
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TT: Great play, great player
The 2005-06 Broadway season is now officially over (whew!). In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the last two new shows I saw, Faith Healer and Shining City:
If Brian Friel isn’t the finest of living playwrights, then he certainly belongs on the shortest possible list of candidates for that supreme honor. We don’t get to see his work often enough in New York, but the season just ended has been bracketed by superlative stagings of two of his strongest scripts. Last summer the Irish Repertory Theatre mounted a perfect production of “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” the 1964 play that put him on the map, and now Broadway has imported the Dublin Gate Theatre’s revival of “Faith Healer,” first seen in this country in 1979.
Unlike the big-name revivals of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (with David Schwimmer) and “Three Days of Rain” (with Julia Roberts) playing next door on 45th Street, though, “Faith Healer,” which stars Ralph Fiennes and Cherry Jones, is a winner. In fact, I’ll go a giant step further: It’s the best show on Broadway….
I came away humbled by the collective mastery of the artists who are bringing “Faith Healer” to blazing life each night. Gifted as they are, though, it is Brian Friel who deserves the highest praise of all. Once again he has proved art’s power to narrow the fearful gap that separates soul from soul. Like every great writer, he reveals us to one another—and to ourselves.
Contrary to appearances, Irish playwrights are not infallible. I place in evidence Conor McPherson’s “Shining City,” which has just been given its American premiere by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Most of my fellow critics raved about this four-character play, but despite the acting of a crack cast led by the irreproachable Brían F. O’Byrne, last seen on Broadway in “Doubt,” I found “Shining City” tenuous to the point of nullity….
No link. Those who care to read the whole thing (and please do!) can always buy a copy of today’s Journal, or (better yet) go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review, plus a plenitude of similarly readable stuff.
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TT: Almanac
"'They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,' chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
"'Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?' inquired the duchess.
"'They go to America,' murmured Lord Henry.
"Sir Thomas frowned. 'I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country,' he said to Lady Agatha. 'I have travelled all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it.'
"'But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?' asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. 'I don't feel up to the journey.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
| Thursday, May 18, 2006
TT: Elsewhere
It’s been far too long since I’ve trolled the ’sphere, so here goes:
• Firstly, let me introduce you to Ms. Culturegrrl, the most interesting new blogger to come along in ages. Mr. Modern Art Notes calls her blog “an automatic, daily must read.” I agree.
• Mr. Playgoer compared the Tony and Obie nominations:
Within 12 hours of each other, the alternate (not even parallel) universes of B'way and "theatre" announced their season's honors. Granted the Tony “awards" proper are still to come. But Obies thankfully don't bother with the two-stage process, so their multiple nominations are in fact their awards.
To compare these lists is (as it is every year) an object lesson in the incredible gulf between theatre as experienced by those who practice and follow it devotedly, and those for whom it is well... tourism, frankly. Or hobby, or industry.
Read the whole thing. It’s very tough, and very smart.
• The Mumpsimus speaks words of wisdom:
Theatre audiences and critics have been conditioned to expect plays to deliver messages, and many good playwrights have mangled their art by bowing down to this condition. One of the problems with the messages delivered by most contemporary plays is that they're predictable and shallow—war is bad, love is good, people should be nice to other people who aren't exactly the same as they are, etc. One of the results of ticket prices being so phenomenally expensive is that audiences expect what they see to give them either a lot of spectacle or some sort of education, though if you've just paid $85 for a seat, what you probably most want is a reinforcing of your current ideas under the guise of education, so that way even if you aren't entertained, at least you feel smart and righteous. (Yes, I'm generalizing horribly.)
• I really, really wish I’d written this:
Finishing a great novel is one of those voluminous experiences; your heart races as the pages thin, you struggle to move your eyes faster, to soak it all up more quickly. It’s the final lap, and the object is to finish without a drop of energy left. When the last page nears, the temptation to skip sentences, paragraphs, entire pages, pulls like some watery undertow. The final page comes in a rush, the last words arrive like a trampling stampede, there and gone before you can comprehend what’s happened. Unlike the end of a movie or a television series, novel time is fluid; you can repeat sentences, skip around on the page. So maybe you read the last line several times, or read it first and then go back and read the paragraph leading up to it. But at some point it hits you: This thing you’ve lived with for a day, a week, a month—these people and places and words you’ve submitted yourself to—they’re over. There’s nothing left to tell….
• Recognize this?
When Saunière pulled down the Caravaggio, the iron gate slammed down and the alarm began to ring. He turned and looked back. The albino was already there, on the other side of the barricade, gun in hand.
It has a Starkly familiar ring, no?
• If you don’t read anything else about the publishing business this week, make a point of reading this.
• Speaking of blind items about interesting art-related statistics, take a look at these, please.
• Who is this guy, anyway? He’s smart:
Happy endings are not all alike. In fact, they're not always happy. People have many strange ideas about Hollywood movies, and it's not always clear what folks mean by the term. "Hollywood" often seems to mean any movie in English, not the product of a certain system in a certain factory town. Also "Hollywood" is often pejorative, a shorthand for whatever criticism one cares to imply without examining it.
But one of the strangest cliches to plague us is that Hollywood movies have happy endings. This idea leads to contempt, derision and satire. I recall one witty article that imagined Hollywood remakes of classic stories, such as having a centurion ride up to Calvary and announce that Jesus has been pardoned. He and Mary embrace.
There are probably more happy endings today than in the past, and it's because studio executives live under the burden of this false idea—that Hollywood purveys happy endings. Let's disprove this notion once and for all….
• For those who wonder why I’m always raving about Budd Boetticher’s Westerns, go here for confirmation of my good taste.
• Speaking of good taste, Mr. Girish pays tribute to one of my all-time favorite movies:
The Fabulous Baker Boys changed my life. Sounds like a hoary old cliché, no? But it’s true. I saw it three times the week it opened in 1989, and without ever having touched middle C, walked into a music store and signed up for piano lessons. The piano has been an integral part of my life since; I can’t imagine living without it….
I may have said it before, but if so I’ll say it again: The Fabulous Baker Boys is the only film I’ve ever seen that is true to my own experience of playing music (except that I never got to sleep with anybody who looked even slightly like Michelle Pfeiffer).
• In case you’ve been wondering what Whit Stillman’s been up to since The Last Days of Disco, here’s the answer—in his own inimitable words.
• Courtesy of Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, here’s a fascinating interview with one of the people who puts together DVD box sets of TV shows. Yes, he sounds like a bit of a geekazoid, but so, too, do I….
• Speaking of geekazoidishness, this terrific Washington Post feature story is the absolute last word on stage blood and its makers.
• Ms. Althouse has been listening to Bob Dylan’s new satellite-radio show, and thinks it brilliant. I can’t wait to rent a car and hear for myself.
• Ms. twang twang twang plays her harp for a brainy audience of Oxfordians, and has an epiphany:
A very clever woman shows it in her face, usually more than a powerfully-minded man. The portraits that line the walls of LMH daily impress this on the students walking by; the first seven minds to penetrate nine hundred years of dreaming ivory towers. Playing the Britten Suite to many such faces today, I suddenly thought, I spend half my life being told to be light, crowd-pleasing, easy on the eye, reassuringly familiar. This is all right (there's a time for everything), but I am never going to apologise for attempting to use the mind I'm lucky enough to have had well-educated, again.
• Mr. Alicublog holds forth on the splendors of demotic speech:
I had a North Carolina girlfriend once, and her mother had no end of lovely expressions. She once referred to spoiled fish as smelling "right boo-booey." Could that be from the French "boue," somehow? In any case I consider myself improved by having heard it. Also by hearing my old Italian landlady say of meeting her husband, "He look at me anna I fell like a pear." And, Texican this, "he got a wild hare," variously "wild hair up his ass"—or "wild hare" up same—never have got that straight….
Me, neither.
• Lastly, I thought you might enjoy seeing a picture of my brother. We look nothing alike, nor are we at all similar, but he’s way cool anyway.
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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 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. (For the third week in a row, however, there are no asterisks.)
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, 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)
OFF BROADWAY:
• 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:
• Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 25)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here, closes July 2)
• Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
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TT: Almanac
"A moment occurs (or should occur) when the growing artist is able to bequeath his tricks to his imitators. The mature writer rejects the treasured 'originality' and the darling virtuosities of his apprenticeship in art, as well as the showy sorrows and joys of his apprenticeship to life, often just in time. 'How they live at home in their cozy poems and make long stays in narrow comparisons!' Rilke once said, speaking of the run of versifiers who never change or grow. Once youth's embroidered coat is cast aside, what is left? Only imagination, ripened insight, experience, and the trained sense of language, which are usually enough."
Louise Bogan, review of The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (1945)
| Wednesday, May 17, 2006
TT: Sign of the times
Earlier today I participated in a public meeting of the National Council on the Arts. It was a teleconference chaired from Washington, D.C., by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The other participants were scattered across the country. I took part in the first half of the meeting via cell phone from the Jackson Hole
on Eighty-Fifth Street and Columbus Avenue, where I was wolfing down the fast-cooling remnants of a medium-rare hamburger that had arrived at my table ten minutes later than I expected. For the second half, I removed my cell phone and myself to a bench in Central Park, basking in the sunshine as the council went about its collective business.
I’m too old to take cell phones for granted. I still remember the first time I received a call from a car phone, back in the days when such things were far from commonplace. Not long after I moved to New York some two decades ago, I made a special point of calling my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from a pay phone on a subway platform, and she was impressed. Now I can’t remember the last time I used a pay phone. (In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a phone booth.)
Technology is part wonderful and part terrible, which means it’s really neither. It makes it possible for me to sit in Central Park on a sunny May day and talk to anyone in the world who has a phone. Whether or not that’s a good thing is, of course, another matter.
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TT: Listen up
I recently taped an episode of Radio Deluxe, the new classic-pop radio series hosted by John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey. Among many other things, John, Jess, and I listened to and talked about records by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Mary Foster Conklin, Bing Crosby, Nancy LaMott, Joe Mooney, George Shearing, and Fats Waller (as well as John himself). It’s a nice mix of chat and music, if I do say so myself, and we had a lot of fun putting it together. You’ll even get to hear me sing!
This episode hasn't yet aired on terrestrial radio, but you can already hear it on line in streaming audio. Go here, scroll down until you see my name, then click on the successive links (each segment of the show is a separate mp3 file) and listen.
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TT: The hits just keep on coming
“Critical Edge,” ArtsJournal’s group blog on the future of criticism in the age of new media, grows livelier by the hour. Here’s a snippet from my latest posting:
Good writing justifies its own existence. If you can find people capable of writing stylish, trenchant reviews of blockbuster movies, by all means hire them and let ’em rip—but don’t settle for anything less. If, on the other hand, you have to choose between publishing mediocre criticism and solid, informative feature writing…well, there’s no choice, least of all nowadays.
Go here to join the fray. The comments section is wide open!
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TT: Entries from an unkept diary
• Our Girl’s second critical commandment, You shall not critique a tulip by wishing it a rose, especially if you grow roses, echoes a widespread sentiment in the cultural quadrant of the ’sphere. I incline to agree, but not always, and only up to a point.
People are forever telling me that a work of art should be “criticized on its own terms.” (Mr. Parabasis, one of my favorite bloggers, got after me a few weeks ago on precisely this count.) Fine—but exactly what does that mean? To extend the metaphor, what if the particular breed of tulip you prefer to cultivate happens to smell like horse manure? Don’t I have a right to point that out, and to suggest that roses might possibly smell better?
I’m not a relativist (surprise, surprise!). I think some works of art are better than others, and I think that issues of quality are of the highest relevance to any criticism worthy of the name. At the same time, I don’t think I get hung up worrying about the dangers of encroaching relativism, nor do I let my unswerving belief in quality prevent me from enjoying the fruits of popular culture. I draw your attention to something I wrote early in the life of this blog:
I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.
The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.
In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s part of what this blog is all about—a big part.
It still is.
• Just the other day I was listening to Pandora as I blogged. Allison Moorer’s “One On the House” gave way to a single piano chord, and a light instantly flashed in my head: it was Bill Evans playing “Here’s That Rainy Day.” I didn’t have to look at the screen to be sure I was right, any more than I had to think twice in the first place. I knew.
I’ll be the first to admit that there once was a time when I was disgustingly vain about my fastest-ear-in-the-west abilities, but subsequent experience has taught me that the world is full of people who can recognize Bill Evans’ playing as quickly as I can. That says a lot about Evans, but it says even more about the human brain and its stupendous capacities. To be sure, I do happen to know a little bit about a lot of things (including the life and work of the woman
who wrote that line). Put me in a museum without my bifocals and I won’t have any more trouble picking out a Stuart Davis or a Kenneth Noland at a hundred yards than I did spotting Bill Evans. Yet such drop-the-needle aptitude, as I say, borders on the commonplace, and that’s the real story. How is it possible for so many of us to store so much aesthetic information in our heads, and to retrieve it so quickly and unhesitatingly? If that doesn’t strike you as miraculous, then you don’t believe in everyday miracles.
I can’t help but recall this almanac entry from two years ago. The speaker is the great French composer Olivier Messiaen:
I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I’d be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn’t it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?
Nice.
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TT: Almanac
"I too am not getting enough done, and what I do always seems to require so much time and effort. For the past few days, I don't think I've done anything worthwhile. Believe me, to feel this way at my age is quite sad, since each time we begin, we always think we've understood, that we have all the answers, but we're always starting over again from the beginning."
Giorgio Morandi (quoted in Janet Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence)
| Tuesday, May 16, 2006
TT: For what it's worth
This year’s Tony Award nominations were just announced. Here are the major categories. My personal picks are in bold, followed by my predictions:
• BEST PLAY:
Rabbit Hole
Shining City
The History Boys
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
I’m not with the majority on this one: The History Boys is a sure thing.
• BEST MUSICAL:
Jersey Boys
The Color Purple
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Wedding Singer
A tough call. My guess, though, is that Jersey Boys will beat out The Drowsy Chaperone, if only because it’s the only crowd-pleasing superhit of the season that also got good reviews, my furious pan excepted. (The Drowsy Chaperone is doing very well, too, but it’s so idiosyncratic that critics and theater buffs are sharply divided over its merits.)
• BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY:
Awake and Sing!
Faith Healer
Seascape
The Constant Wife
An easy call: Faith Healer has this category sewed up tight. (Yo, where’s The Odd Couple? Do I detect a whiff of Lane-Broderick-Mantello backlash among the electorate?)
• BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL:
Sweeney Todd
The Pajama Game
The Threepenny Opera
Oh, wow, beats me. Sweeney Todd was definitely the critics’ choice, but then we all loved The Pajama Game, too. If I had to bet on the winner, I’d probably go for Sweeney Todd, but I wouldn’t put up a whole lot of money either way.
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY:
Ralph Fiennes, Faith Healer
Richard Griffiths, The History Boys
Zeljko Ivanek, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Oliver Platt, Shining City
David Wilmot, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Probably Fiennes, but Griffiths is a contender, and should be.
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY:
Kate Burton, The Constant Wife
Judy Kaye, Souvenir
Lisa Kron, Well
Cynthia Nixon, Rabbit Hole
Lynn Redgrave, The Constant Wife
This is the weakest category overall, though Cynthia Nixon will doubtless win for all sorts of reasons, none of them relevant. (Note the conspicuous absence of J-l-- R-b-rts from the roster.)
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Michael Cerveris, Sweeney Todd
Harry Connick, Jr., The Pajama Game
Stephen Lynch, The Wedding Singer
Bob Martin, The Drowsy Chaperone
John Lloyd Young, Jersey Boys
No contest—it’s Connick. Sometimes star power counts, and sometimes it should, if not necessarily in this case. (Martin’s performance is delightful, but it’s a non-singing part.)
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL:
La Chanze, The Color Purple
Sutton Foster, The Drowsy Chaperone
Patti LuPone, Sweeney Todd
Kelli O’Hara, The Pajama Game
Chita Rivera, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life
Everyone was good, the first three nominees exceptionally so. I can see La Chanze winning, if only because none of the voters will want to shut out so successful and Oprah-certified a show, lame though it was. (Me, I would have given it to Nellie McKay for The Threepenny Opera.)
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Samuel Barnett, The History Boys
Domhnall Gleeson, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Ian McDiarmid, Faith Healer
Mark Ruffalo, Awake and Sing!
Pablo Schreiber, Awake and Sing!
McDiarmid had the better part, but Ruffalo is deserving, too. Not to worry—his time will come.
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY:
Tyne Daly, Rabbit Hole
Frances de la Tour, The History Boys
Jane Houdyshell, Well
Alison Pill, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Zoë Wanamaker, Awake and Sing!
Houdyshell might as well go ahead and dust off her mantlepiece.
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL:
Danny Burstein, The Drowsy Chaperone
Jim Dale, The Threepenny Opera
Victor Dixon, The Color Purple
Manoel Felciano, Sweeney Todd
Christian Hoff, Jersey Boys
Dale. They've got to give Threepenny something.
• BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL:
Carolee Carmello, Lestat
Felicia P. Fields, The Color Purple
Beth Leavel, The Drowsy Chaperone
Megan Lawrence, The Pajama Game
Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, The Color Purple
Lawrence deserves it, and with Fields and Withers-Mendes splitting the vote for The Color Purple, she’ll probably get it.
• BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY:
Nicholas Hytner, The History Boys
Wilson Milam, The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Bartlett Sher, Awake and Sing!
Daniel Sullivan, Rabbit Hole
Hytner or Milam, probably the former.
• BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL:
John Doyle, Sweeney Todd
Kathleen Marshall, The Pajama Game
Des McAnuff, Jersey Boys
Casey Nicholaw, The Drowsy Chaperone
All are worthy, Doyle most likely, especially if The Pajama Game wins for Best Revival of a Musical.
• BEST CHOREOGRAPHY:
Rob Ashford, The Wedding Singer
Donald Byrd, The Color Purple
Kathleen Marshall, The Pajama Game
Casey Nicholaw, The Drowsy Chaperone
Byrd. (See “Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.”)
• BEST ORIGINAL SCORE (MUSIC AND/OR LYRICS) WRITTEN FOR THE THEATRE:
The Color Purple
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Wedding Singer
The Woman in White
The Drowsy Chaperone, definitely, as a consolation prize for Jersey Boys’ Best Musical win.
• BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL:
The Wedding Singer
Jersey Boys
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Color Purple
Likewise, I’m sure.
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TT: Still boiling
“Critical Edge,” ArtsJournal’s group blog on the future of criticism in the age of new media, continues to percolate vigorously. Here’s a snippet from my latest posting:
A critic who holds himself at arm's length from the artistic community whose activities he covers is a eunuch in the harem….
Go here to join the fray.
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TT: Re: person I knew
Lileks read my recent posting on The Birth of a Nation, and had this reaction:
The inexhaustible Teachout on Monday had a few notes about silent movies, and how they don’t speak to him. One of those instances of art that’s lost its language, even though the genre remains. Me, I love the stuff, but I understand the impatience, and sometimes I find myself enjoying the films not as a drama or comedy but an unintentional documentary. What suburban street is that? Is that sapling now a towering oak? Who belongs to those ghostly faces that slide past in the streetcar, and what became of them? Is everything in this image of a city street now gone? Surely inside those windows were men and women going about their lives, chewing on a pencil, digesting a sandwich, worried about a lump or a lover, wishing the person on the phone would shut up so they could use the lav.
It’s like getting a satellite photo of ancient Rome—it would tell us so much, but it would leave out 99 percent of what we really want to know.
But that one percent still tantalizes and teaches, doesn’t it? If nothing else, it tells you what people found funny or sad or shocking….
I think about such things all the time when watching old movies, with or without sound. Even when they’re not especially artful—perhaps especially when they’re not—they are through-a-glass-darkly windows on the past. Every film shot on location, whether in whole or in part, is a home movie in which bits and pieces of history are embedded, and I find myself growing increasingly fascinated by these snippets of lost time. I can’t watch North by Northwest, for instance, without thinking about how Grand Central Station has (and hasn’t) changed, or how the Plaza Hotel will never be again as it was.
This is, I suspect, as much a function of my increasing age as anything else. Just the other day, for instance, Backstage Books sent me a copy of the newly revised and updated edition of James Gavin’s Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. (It'll be out May 31.) The earlier edition was one of my favorite books, but I found this version even more interesting, in part because it’s the first time I’ve read a work of history in which someone I used to know well figures prominently. That sort of thing doesn't start happening to you until you've achieved a certain degree of seniority, and I'm there.
The person I knew was, of course, Nancy LaMott, whose all-too-brief reign as the shooting star of cabaret in Manhattan began a few years after the publication in 1991 of Intimate Nights. Alas, I missed out on the scuffling that Nancy endured so bravely and Gavin describes so vividly. I didn’t meet her until the spring of 1994, by which time she was already singing at Tavern on the Green and the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. I entered her life just in time for us to become close friends, though, and our friendship endured until her death in December of 1995, a few weeks after the release of her last studio album, Listen to My Heart.
I’ve written about Nancy more than once, both on this blog and in a 1996 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader. So far as I know, Intimate Nights is the only other book in which Nancy is mentioned, and it was a strange, almost disorienting sensation to read about her in someone else’s words:
Nancy LaMott seemed like such a delicate bird that one wondered when she might break. A waiflike, all-American blonde, she sang with the earnestness of a lovestruck teenager who was smiling through tears. People wanted to take her in their arms and protect her—especially when they learned that her struggle for recognition coincided with her fight against Crohn’s disease, an intestinal disorder with horribly debilitating side effects. It had struck her in her teens, and would take her life in 1995, when she was forty-three. By then she had recorded six CDs, sung at the White House, and appeared on Regis & Kathie Lee. All this, through her no-frills singing of standards. In LaMott’s [New York] Times obituary, Stephen Holden would remember her as “a singularly unaffected voice…in a field typified by showy histrionics.”
All true, though I never thought of her as “delicate,” perhaps because we shared so many meals. (She knew her way around a kitchen.) Nancy was much tougher than she looked. Still, Gavin has gotten her right in every other particular, which is hugely important, since his revised version of Intimate Nights, which ends in 2005, will undoubtedly replace the first edition as the standard history of cabaret in New York.
It is, as I say, exceedingly strange to read about an old friend in the kind of book that can properly be described as a “standard history,” if only because no book, however detailed, can tell the whole story of a human being. History, like biography, is an attempt to tell that which can only be remembered. I know a great deal more about Nancy than you’ll find in Intimate Nights, including certain things you won’t read in anything I’ve written about her. I might share them with a biographer someday, or I might not. I just watched a PBS documentary
about John Ford and John Wayne, who once made a film together in which one of the characters famously declares that “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” I wouldn’t go that far—I am, after all, a serial biographer myself—but I don’t think the public has an absolute right to know everything about anyone, no matter who they were or how important they might have been.
Be that as it may, I’m glad that James Gavin did such a good job of sketching Nancy's essential character, though it goes without saying that I don’t need to read about my old friend in order to bring her immediately to mind. Stephen Sondheim wrote a song about the persistence of memory called, appropriately enough, “Not a Day Goes By.” Nancy recorded it a couple of years before she died, and I listen to her performance from time to time, trying whenever I do to imagine all the years of friendship her death stole from me:
As the days go by,
I keep thinking, “When does it end?
Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting?”
But I just go on
Thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no,
Not a day goes by,
Not a blessed day
But you’re still somewhere part of my life
And you won’t go away.
I'm old enough now to know how true that is.
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TT: Isolationist
Ten things I haven’t done in 2006:
• I haven’t bought a copy of an ink-on-paper magazine or newspaper.
• I haven’t watched a first-run episode of a TV series.
• I haven’t been to a movie theater (though I’m planning to break my fast by seeing Art School Confidential).
• I haven’t rented a DVD.
• I haven’t read a new novel.
• I haven’t seen a ballet.
• I haven’t been to an orchestra concert.
• I haven’t written a book review.
• I haven’t gone to a party.
• I haven’t visited my home town.
Not yet, anyway.
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TT: Almanac
“Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book: Treasure Island” (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)
| Monday, May 15, 2006
TT: Escape artist
I flew the coop last Wednesday morning, having seen too many plays and feeling the urgent need to be somewhere else. By mid-afternoon I was sitting on the terrace of Ecce Bed and Breakfast in Barryville, a microscopic river town not far from the spot where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. Longtime readers may recall my previous visit to this refuge, located on a wooded bluff some three hundred feet above the Delaware River. It's one of the most relaxing places I know: the scenery is gorgeous, the hosts considerate, the food delicious, the décor not even slightly chintzy. Rarely is a B&B as satisfying as its Web site so enticingly promises, but every time I go to Ecce, it turns out to be even better than advertised.
What did I do there? Just about nothing. I listened to music, I read Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg and Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, I watched a bald eagle swoop lazily over the river, and I drove to Narrowsburg, another small town fifteen minutes up the road, where I ate a superlative dinner at a brand-new restaurant that I commend to your attention. Peter Schott, the chef and owner of Restaurant 15 Main, used to cook in Manhattan but has now set up shop in the country, where he turns out such sumptuous dishes as green garlic soup with frogs' legs and the best gnocchi I’ve ever tasted, the latter accompanied by locally grown, lightly sauteed fiddlehead ferns. Yum. (The 15 Main Web site is still under construction, but should you find yourself anywhere near Narrowsburg, call 845-252-6562 to make a reservation. You won't be sorry.)
I would have been content to spend the rest of the week driving between Barryville and Narrowsburg. Instead I returned to New York on Friday afternoon, unpacked my bags, and headed for Joe’s Pub, where Deidre Rodman
and Steve Swallow
were celebrating the release of Twin Falls, their new CD, with a gig at which they played so beautifully that I wasn’t sorry to have come back home. When not making pellucidly lyrical music with Swallow or her own quintet, Rodman is the pianist for the Lascivious Biddies, about whom I've written from time to time in this space (as well as in my liner notes for their latest CD, Get Lucky). All three of her fellow Biddies showed up to cheer Rodman on, and I was as pleased to see them again as I was to hear her.
The next morning I awoke at nine-thirty and remembered that two museum shows I’d been meaning to see, Goya at the Frick Collection and David Smith at the Guggenheim, were about to close. I threw my clothes on, jumped in a cab, and went straight to the Frick, where I found a line of hopeful art lovers stretching halfway around the block. The word on the street was that I’d have to wait two hours to get in. Not caring to fritter away so pretty a morning in so tiresome a fashion, I walked up Fifth Avenue to the Guggenheim, where I stood in line for fifteen seconds before being admitted.
Needless to say, David Smith isn’t as popular as Goya, nor do I claim to like his welded-metal abstract-expressionist sculptures as much as Goya’s paintings. In fact, I’ve never liked Smith very much at all, but most of my fellow critics think him a master, so I felt obliged to take him on yet again, though I didn’t change my mind this time around. Except for the “Cubis” sculptures, which rarely fail to bowl me over, I continue to find most of Smith’s work a fussy, derivative amalgam of surrealism and ill-digested biomorphism (though I did like Steel Drawing I, one of the smaller pieces in the show, very much). So be it. You can’t like everything that’s good, and you shouldn’t pretend to like anything. In the wise words of Kingsley Amis, “All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.”
I left the Guggenheim with my bell unrung, crossed Fifth Avenue, and plunged into Central Park, where the Great Lawn was packed with ecstatic children taking advantage of a lovely day. No show tonight! I told myself happily, and took my sweet time strolling home.
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TT: A little traveling music
Here are the CDs I took with me on my trip to Barryville:
• The Best of Blind Blake (Yazoo)
• Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I Crave: The Best of Leroy Carr (Columbia/Legacy)
• Paul Desmond, Pure Desmond (CTI)
• Donald Fagen, Morph the Cat (Reprise)
• Lyle Lovett, Joshua Judges Ruth (MCA/Curb)
• Mitchell’s Christian Singers, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1: 1934-1936 (Document)
• Weslia Whitfield, Lucky to Be Me (Landmark)
If you’ve never heard of Mitchell’s Christian Singers—and most people haven’t—go here to read what an anonymous critic for Time wrote about them in 1939. It is, not surprisingly, more than a little bit condescending, but I bet it'll pique your curiosity anyway.
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TT: Simultaneity
In my biweekly “Sightings” column, which appeared in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I played Bill Safire avant la lettre—sort of:
Not long ago I was chatting with three gifted musicians who were looking for a new way to describe what they do. All are widely thought of as “jazz musicians,” even though that venerable phrase is no longer a good fit for the increasingly uncategorizable music they make. Luciana Souza, who came to this country from Brazil, sings everything from bossa nova to American pop standards to her own settings of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Pablo Neruda. Maria Schneider leads a big band for which she writes large-scale compositions structured along classical lines into which she weaves flamenco, Latin American music and jazz improvisation. Theo Bleckmann is an uncompromisingly avant-garde vocalist whose latest album, “Las Vegas Rhapsody: The Night They Invented Champagne,” is a collection of show tunes accompanied by the Basel Chamber Orchestra.
How do you sum up such artists in a well-chosen word or two? You don’t—and that’s one of the problems with which they grapple as they try to find an audience for their music. This is why I was so struck when one of the three musicians (I can’t remember who) casually used the phrase “shuffle play” in an attempt to describe the stylistic multiplicity of their work. The others agreed at once: That’s what they do.
I wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed by their on-the-spot consensus were it not for the fact that I’d already heard the same phrase used in the same way by other artists of like inclination. Suddenly it hit me: I’d been watching a new cultural metaphor take shape….
The new music I have in mind isn’t random, but it definitely goes out of its way to take the listener in surprising directions. The Bad Plus, for instance, specializes in bracingly quirky jazz versions of such decidedly unjazzy tunes as Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and the theme from “Chariots of Fire.” Nickel Creek plays bluegrass-flavored music that owes as much to the synthesized technopop of Radiohead as it does to the high, lonesome sound of Bill Monroe. “Observatory,” Julia Dollison’s debut CD, contains songs by Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington and Rufus Wainwright, sung in a richly imaginative, pigeonhole-eluding style that lies somewhere in the no-man’s-land separating jazz from pop.
Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See and Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza are operalike “musicals” whose kaleidoscopic scores reflect their composers’ passions for an extraordinarily wide variety of music. Osvaldo Golijov writes “classical” music into which he stirs Afro-Cuban percussion, gospel-style choral writing, even the keening wail of a klezmer clarinet.
What to call this new kind of music-making? At first glance it resembles postmodernism, but the self-consciously wide-ranging eclecticism of postmodern artists is always tinged with irony, whereas the musicians of whom I’m thinking embrace many different styles in a wholehearted way that has nothing in common with the cool detachment of the postmodernist. Their new approach thus requires a new label, and “shuffle-play music” might be in the early stages of catching on….
No link, so if you want to read the whole thing—of which there’s a good deal more—I suggest you avail yourself of one of these alternatives:
(1) Head for the nearest library, where you'll find a copy of the Saturday Journal and (presumably) a comfy chair.
(2) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. Doing so will give you immediate access to the full text of this week's “Sightings” column, plus a plethora of other good stuff.
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TT: Group grope
Douglas McLennan is the resident genius behind ArtsJournal. In addition to providing an indispensable daily digest of English-language news stories and commentaries on the arts, ArtsJournal also hosts “About Last Night” and a dozen other artblogs (all of which you can visit by scrolling down to the bottom module of the right-hand column). Now Doug has put together a special group-discussion blog called “Critical Edge: Critics in a Critical Age.”
Here, in his words, is what "Critical Edge" is all about:
Everyone's a critic. And now that anyone has access to an audience through the internet, our computers have become a cacophony of people with opinions. Clearly not all opinions are equal. Traditionally, the influence of an opinion was closely tied to the venue in which it was published—how widely it was disseminated or how prestigious the publication was thought to be. With a growing flood of opinions available to all, some suggest that the influence of the traditional critic is waning, that the opinions of the many will drown out the power of the few. But in a time when access to information and entertainment and art seems to be growing exponentially, more than ever we need ways to to sort through the mass and get at the "good" stuff. The question is how? Where is the critical authority to come from? Some suggest that new social networking software that ranks community preferences and elevates some opinions over others will supplant the formerly powerful traditional critics. So what is to be the new critical currency? Stripped of traditional legitimacies, how will the most interesting critical voices be heard and have influence?
Doug has put together a wide-ranging list of participants, many of whose names will be familiar to you:
• Misha Berson, theatre critic, Seattle Times
• Larry Blumenfeld, jazz critic, The Wall Street Journal
• Caryn Brooks, writer
• Jeanne Carstensen, managing editor, Salon.com
• Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor, Rolling Stone
• Enrique Fernandez, critic, Miami Herald
• Tyler Green, art critic, Modern Art Notes
• Joseph Horowitz, author/orchestra consultant
• Chris Lavin, arts editor, San Diego Union Tribune
• Ruth Lopez, art and design editor, Time Out Chicago
• Maud Newton, book critic, MaudNewton.com
• Claude Peck, fine arts editor, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
• Inga Saffron, architecture critic, Philadelphia Inquirer
• Andras Szanto, former director, National Arts Journalism Program
• Jerome Weeks, book critic, Dallas Morning News
I’m participating, too.
"Critical Edge" is now open for business and will be up and running through Wednesday. To read our collective discussion of the prospects for criticism in the age of the Web, go here and start scrolling.
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TT: Almanac
"I believe the great human change into a new world should be expressed, but I also believe that when the Soviet arbiters say that Hamlet is foolish, they are talking nonsense, and destructive nonsense at that. And I hope the human race will never be purged of those types, who, like Shakespeare, are victims all their mature life of the most dreadful form of morbid jealousy, or of unconscious homosexuals like Hopkins and Housman, or of perfectly batty people, who drive themselves into extreme fits over the fact that the landlady looked at them sideways, like Beethoven. God keep me from a world, even without poverty and human degradation, in which there were no delicate sensibilities that could produce a remark like Margaret, are you grieving; or An expense of spirit in a waste of shame; that could not feel horror over mutability and an excess of joy over the facts of perfectly physical passion, or pity for the maladjusted or horror over the senseless cruel."
Louise Bogan, letter to Rolfe Humphries, July 6, 1935
| Friday, May 13, 2005
TT: Before I go
Read this:
So here are some ideas for improving theater writing in America:
1) Recognize that the relationship between artist and reviewer is one of exploitation. I think it would be harder for reviewers to be snarky if they remembered that it was the bad play they saw that is putting food on their table, or that they get paid more than I do to trash my work. I am not asking for an end to negative or even harsh criticism, god knows, we need it. But what we need even more than that is considered, intelligent, thoughtful criticism that lays out reasons, arguments, analysis instead of “this sucks.”…
Yes.
The whole thing is here. Read it all.
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TT: Go south, middle-aged man
That's all from me for this week. I'm off to the Kennedy Center, there to dine with my maximally cool Washington friend and see Alladeen, a wonderful multi-media show by the Builders Association, a remarkable theatrical group with which I've been semi-obsessed ever since I saw Alladeen a year and a half ago at BAM and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:
You may not know it, but when you dial an 800 number to order a fruitcake or gripe about your Internet service provider, your call is often answered by an Indian operator who has been given an American-sounding pseudonym, painstakingly (though not always successfully) taught to shed his native accent, and assigned to help you as best he can for the lowest possible per-call price. Half performance art, half documentary, “Alladeen” tells the story of these deracinated residents of Nowhere, U.S.A., who take calls from halfway around the world without ever having seen the distant land they pretend to inhabit….
Marianne Weems, the director and tutelary spirit of “Alladeen,” claims the show is all about “the social imagination in an age of corporate colonialism.” Not to worry, though: Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this PC-speak high concept into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center.
Here's how much I liked it the first time: I'm going to see it in Washington tonight on my own dime, purely for my pleasure (and that of my friend). How about that?
I'll be back Monday as usual, and blogging, damn it, will be light. I overblogged this week, and I am bruised. I hope you appreciated it! In the meantime, have a nice weekend.
Over to you, OGIC….
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TT: Magic act
Friday again. My Wall Street Journal drama column again. I'm in a v. good mood, thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in which I am well pleased:
In theater as in all other art forms, believe what you see, not what you're told. On paper, Shakespeare Theatre's production of “The Tempest” sounds like the worst kind of politico-intellectual stew, Shakespeare run through the theory mill and turned into a Statement for Our Times. On stage, it's a fantastic procession of sights and sounds that will set your head to spinning. Kate Whoriskey, the director, may fancy herself a purveyor of ideas, but in fact she's something infinitely more precious—a natural-born stage magician….
I can't think why we haven't seen more of her in New York. In fact, I'd like to see her “Tempest” in New York, ideally at the Public Theater, where I'm sure it'd knock everybody sideways. Don't wait for it, though—instead, go to Washington and let yourself be enraptured by the most imaginative Shakespeare production I've seen since Propeller's all-male “Midsummer Night's Dream.”
Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, I was scarcely less delighted by a new revival of She Stoops to Conquer:
Lest we forget, there's more than one way to skin a classic. The Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of “She Stoops to Conquer,” which opened last night, is a resolutely unfantastic, straight-down-the-center staging of Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 farce, devoid of the slightest trace of trickery and played on an old-fashioned drawing-room set whose walls are festooned with no less than 65 gloomy-looking paintings (yes, I counted them). The actors and actresses are bedecked in periwigs and petticoats—and the results couldn't be more pleasing….
No link. WillyoujustbuythedamnpaperforGod'ssake? Or go here and stride boldly forward into the Information Age. (Psst—it's a bargain.)
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TT: Elsewhere
What they said:
• Go get 'em, Althouse:
Speaking of sincere, how sincere was Joni Mitchell in "Woodstock"? She didn't attend, and, in fact, she played at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a few weeks before, and walked off in the middle of her set, after ranting at the audience for failing to pay rapt attention to her. We were milling around, dancing and talking, and acting like a big bunch of hippies. She did not like it one bit. She steered way clear of Woodstock, then wrote a song idealizing it.
"Then can I walk beside you?" she wrote, but the fact is, she didn't want to be anywhere near these people.
• Poor Little Professor! She's been grading papers:
"These works have many similarities and many differences." This. Means. Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing. (Insert instructor banging her forehead against the desk here.)
It gets worse….
• Meanwhile, Laura Lippman wraps up her classroom stint for the year:
Another tradition in the last class—another tradition based on once—is reading the worst review I've ever received. Bear in mind, it's not the cruelest, which was also so wrong-headed that it was easy to dismiss. This is a thoughtful, nuanced piece that judged the work, Every Secret Thing, by the very standards I had set for myself—and rated me a dismal failure. The writer is unknown to me; I can neither dismiss her as a fool nor elevate her to god-like authority.
This is the price, I tell my students. If you get lucky enough to publish and make a life as a writer, you will enter a field where anyone—truly anyone, in our Internet age—can make vicious, even personal, assessments. Get used to it. Toughen up. It's a relatively small price to pay for being published….
Mine aren't quite that big, but here's something I used to do in my own last class: when I taught criticism at Rutgers/Newark, I handed out each week a review by a well-known critic of the past without telling the students who wrote it, then asked them to comment on it. The last handout of the semester was one of my own pieces. Kids say the darnedest things....
• Critical Mass offers a cautionary tale for bloggers everywhere, but especially in the academy:
At SMU, a popular adjunct professor has been fired—or, more precisely, "not renewed"—and the word is that her firing had a lot to do with her blog. Elaine Liner has taught writing as an adjunct at SMU for several years; she is also a local theater critic and, until recently, she led an active anonymous life online as the Phantom Professor, an outspoken critic of the academy whose tales of campus life ultimately hit a little too close to home for her colleagues. Though Liner never told anyone at SMU that she was the Phantom Professor, and while she never named names or identified her place of work, her descriptions of SMU's campus culture and her portraits of students and colleagues were accurate enough that people at SMU began to recognize their school, their friends, their teachers, and even themselves, in Liner's words….
Click through this posting to Liner's blog. Yikes!
• Wax Banks earns an entry in my commonplace book:
Irritation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Likewise Lileks:
I have no bumperstickers, for the same reason I do not paste editorials with which I agree on the seat of my pants.
(Was it Alison Lurie who coined the phrase “legible clothing”?)
• Same blogger, different day:
Blogging has ruined public social events. Now you have to begin by asking “anyone blogging this?” which is like lining up the wait staff at the Stork Club and asking which one is going to phone Winchell tonight. Then you have to request that certain lines of conversation are off the record—in a bar! A bar, with Prince music playing at levels that would liquefy gorilla prostates at fifty paces. No one can hear anything. Finally, you have to leave the party early to write the blog entry, which consists of coy remarks about all the wonderful things you can't reveal. So people just post pictures with people standing around grinning in the harsh wash of a flash, the inky black of the bar behind them.
We are all on the record now….
• Mr. Superfluities serves up a very useful two-kinds-of paradigm:
In so far as it specifically relates to theater, it occurred to me that, on the off-off-Broadway scene, we can divide theater into two distinct disciplines. The first, Barroom Theater, is the stream that emerged from Cafe Cino and its other raucous siblings: energetic, seeking active engagement from the audience, irreverent. This theater swims in popular culture: it yells, it whoops, it prances, it gets drunk, it takes off its top and drops its pants and lets its inhibitions loose. The second, Gallery Theater, is that which was practiced in the Artists' Theater and similar spaces: contemplative, the performance an object to be observed rather than an activity in which one became engaged, similarly irreverent but somewhat detached from its function as entertainment (though still, we might put it in our intellectualized way, “amusing”).
There are vices and virtues to each, of course. As wildly entertaining as Barroom Theater is, it unfortunately tends to pander to its audience's desire for distraction. There's a garrulous “love me, pity me” feel that you get from drunks in the same venue; and speaking of drunks, it's hard to keep their attention, and you have to reach for more spectacular and more vacuous effects just to dissuade their eyes from wandering. On the other hand, Gallery Theater is an insider's game, frequently self-absorbed, self-important and cliquish, and visual art has a tendency to slavish distillation whereas performing art tends to “celebrate” the performative experience (that is, to make lots and lots of noise and shine flashlights into the audience's faces; but most audiences like that, for it makes them feel important)….
Read the whole thing, please.
• Mr. Sandow asks a good question:
You can't blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can't blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I've mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MoMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn't music work that way?
• While we're on the subject, guess who said this?
Then there are two developments in music itself that have their origins primarily in the West but that for a long time have affected the whole of mankind in the world culture that is being formed. Modern so-called "classical" music has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter—and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings. The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path….
(Stop waving your hand, Alex Ross, I know you know.)
• Quotations from Chairman Wayne (Shorter, that is), courtesy of JazzPortraits:
“Miles [Davis] turns around to me this one time," recalls the 71-year-old New Jersey jazz giant, "and he says, 'Wayne, do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music?'. Then before I answer, he says 'I know what you mean'. We were on the same page….
“Miles would say, 'You see how Humphrey Bogart walked in that movie? How John Wayne threw that punch? You see how Marlon Brando played with Eva Marie Saint's glove in On the Waterfront?' Miles would say to the young student, 'Play that'."
• James Panero tells you how to spend a lot of money:
Twenty-five hours of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" have now been released on DVD. The news should not be taken lightly. It should rather be taken as a cue to order copies immediately. As a boon to home schoolers and to parents concerned with the state, where it still exists, of music education today (drumming for credit, anyone?), these DVDs will be invaluable. Just about anyone—adults and children alike—will find a great deal to take away from the episodes. Bernstein's convincing theories on the connection of folk music to national style are just one example (Episode 9: "Folk Music in the Concert Hall"). The series also includes complete performances of Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" (Episode 11: "Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky"), Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 (Episode 19: "A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich"), and Aaron Copland guest conducting part of his own Symphony No. 3 (Episode 2: "What is American Music?")….
I remember quite a few of these televised concerts from my childhood. I revisited some of them in adulthood, and my memories were right on the money—they were, and are, wonderful.
• I have a title for Catherine Seipp's first essay collection. She should call it Du côté de chez Walt:
Speaking of memory, my first trip to Disneyland, at age eight, was what first made me ponder the puzzling relationship between memory and reality. Is it better (I thought, as I lay awake in bed for hours that night after we got home) to be on the bobsleds, which only lasts a couple of minutes—or to remember having been on the bobsleds, which lasts forever? If you could go on the bobsleds 100 times, but your memory each time would vanish as soon as you were done, is that really more fun than to go on them only once but remember the experience always?...
• Finally, Supermaud explores a linguistic conundrum:
But at lunch the other day, a friend who hails from D.C. but has a Louisiana mama reminded me of one of the Deep South's most beloved, multi-purpose, and deadly expressions: "bless her heart."
In its most innocuous usage, the phrase is intended to express empathy and understanding, as in: "Why, you've been traveling all day. You must be exhausted, bless your heart. Why don't you go lie down until it's time for dinner?"
But like most things Southern (except sweet tea), the expression has a dark side. Basically, you can say the most slanderous thing you can think of, as long as it's accompanied with a lingering, mournful "bless her heart."…
Or “bless her little heart,” as we used to say in Smalltown, U.S.A.
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TT: Almanac
"It matters very little to me whether people believe one thing or another. Life is short, even for those who live to a ripe old age, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them."
Sarah Bernhardt, Memoirs (courtesy of Think Denk)
| Thursday, May 12, 2005
TT: We've got to stop meeting like this
I don't know what got into me yesterday and today, but I'm blogged out. Really. And I'm going to stop. No more blogging until Friday. I swear. If I post anything else today, look the other way and pretend you didn't see it.
Till tomorrow. Really.
(Oh, er, one more thing: the Top Fives have been updated. It's O.K. to look at those.)
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TT: This one's for you, Girl
I just received the Summer 2005 edition of The Sondheim Review (not yet on line), which contains an interview with Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and—surprise, surprise!—a self-confessed Stephen Sondheim fanatic. Says Whedon: “What Sondheim has to say is the most honest, perceptive expression of the human experience that I know.”
Here's an excerpt:
Whedon's parents introduced him to Sondheim's musicals when he was a child, and he believes shows like Company and A Little Night Music were formative in the development of his creative vision, one that's “existential and bleak,” though shot through with acts of devotion, courage and faith….
If childhood seems a strange time to be exposed to the bitterness and disappointment of early-'70s Sondheim, Whedon counters that it accurately reflected the family experience of his early years. “Sondheim wasn't someone you would go to if you wanted to be told that everything was perfect. Neither were my parents, for that matter—all concerned were greatly relieved when they got divorced. I told my therapist that I knew all of Follies by the age of nine; she said, 'We have our work cut out for us.'”
If you're really good, OGIC, I'll bring a copy of the magazine with me to Chicago next weekend....
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TT: Peanut gallery
Someone's been sending me peanuts—the styrofoam kind, to be exact. These malign little chunks of plastic and air may well be the best possible thing with which to pack a box containing a framed work of art, but they also have a sneaky way of insinuating themselves into every corner of the room in which the box in question is opened, which is what happened yesterday afternoon when I took delivery of a well-sealed carton containing the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph by Jules Olitski. No sooner did I pry it open than whoom! The whole living room was ankle-deep in white peanuts.
Time out for a little backstory. After I delivered the first two chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to Harcourt last week, I figured I owed myself a present in return for all that hard work, so I started looking around for a new piece of art. I ran across Olitski's 1995 lithograph Forward Edge in an online auction the very next day, and fell in love at first sight.
By coincidence—or not—I'd only just become seriously interested in Olitski, who prior to that time had been little more than a name to me. To be sure, I'd been wanting for some time to acquire a piece by an important color-field painter to go with my copy of Helen Frankenthaler's Grey Fireworks, but I already had my eye on Circle I-6, a 1978 Kenneth Noland monoprint. Alas, I never did manage to track down an affordable copy (affordable by me, that is), so instead of going off half-cocked and buying something simply to be buying something, I sat tight and waited for inspiration.
Three weeks ago, Ann Freedman of Knoedler & Company
sent me a copy of Jules Olitski: Six Decades, the catalogue of a small-scale retrospective in Miami curated by Karen Wilkin, one of my favorite art critics. (It's up through the end of May, should you happen to be in the vicinity.) The first paragraph caught me off guard:
Jules Olitski celebrated his eightieth birthday, in 2002, by exhibiting a series of recent paintings titled With Love and Disregard. The no-holds-barred canvases were so surprising, muscular, and energetic that the uninitiated could have been forgiven for thinking they were the work of an extravagantly gifted, fearless newcomer….Only a lifetime of making and thinking about paintings could generate work at once so obviously indifferent to ordinary notions of beauty (and that much maligned idea, taste) and so confident. Art historians call this kind of brilliant, assured inventiveness in the work of long-lived artists who continue to challenge themselves “late style.”
As always, Wilkin had backed up her provocative words with a shrewd and illuminating choice of paintings, and as I flipped through the catalogue, I felt myself getting onto Olitski's wavelength for the first time. By the time I was done, I resolved to add him to the Teachout Museum at the earliest opportunity—which came, improbably enough, just two weeks later.
Even in electronic reproduction, Forward Edge took my breath away, and two years of intensive collecting have taught me to trust that kind of immediate, unhesitating response. I put in an absentee bid, then left town for a wedding. No sooner did I get back to New York than I found that Forward Edge had been knocked down to me for well under my top price.
Further proof that my decision to buy Forward Edge was in tune with the will of the universe came when I hung it yesterday afternoon. I'd planned to spend most of the evening moving things around, but I hit the sweet spot on the very first try. It was as though my living room had been waiting patiently for the arrival of something of whose existence I was hitherto unaware. (I guess it is like falling in love, isn't it?) Now I can't wait to show off the Teachout Museum to the next person who comes calling. For the moment, though, I mean to spend as much time as possible curled up on my couch, basking in the subtly altered mixture of harmonies that fills the air of my home.
Art is good. Life is good. I could do without all those damn peanuts, though.
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TT: Almanac
“Tony's voice seemed to come from a long way off. There was a weight on Charles again, the same old weight, and it was heavier after that brief moment of freedom. In spite of all those years, in spite of all his striving, it was remarkable how little pleasure he took in final fulfillment. He was a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. It was what he had dreamed of long ago and yet it was not the true texture of early dreams. The whole thing was contrived, as he had said to Nancy, an inevitable result, a strangely hollow climax. It had obviously been written in the stars, bound to happen, and he could not have changed a line of it, being what he was, and Nancy would be pleased, but it was not what he had dreamed.
“'Well, Tony,' he said, 'I guess that means I can send Junior to Exeter,' and Tony Burton was asking why Exeter? He would not send any boy of his to Exeter.
“They were on a different basis already, now that he was a vice-president. Automatically, his thoughts were running along new lines, well-trained, mechanically perfect thoughts, estimating a new situation. There would be no trouble with the directors. There were only five vice-presidents at the Stuyvesant, all of the others older than he, most of them close to the retirement age, like Tony Burton himself. For a moment he thought of Mr. Laurence Lovell on Johnson Street but Mr. Lovell would not have understood, or Jessica either, how far he had gone or what it meant to be a vice-president of the Stuyvesant Bank. Nancy would understand. Nancy had more ambition for him than he had for himself. Nancy would be very proud. They would sell the house at Sycamore Park and get a larger place. They would resign from the Oak Knoll Club. And then there was the sailboat. It had its compensations but it was not what he had dreamed.”
John P. Marquand, Point of No Return
| Wednesday, May 11, 2005
TT: Life sentence
Overheard at lunch: "When it comes to dating, we're all Dorothy Parkers under the skin."
Here's the scary part: the person I overheard saying it was me....
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TT: A smile from the mailbag
A reader writes:
Your "Entries from an Unkept Diary" for today
reminds me that I
want to thank you for helping me seem somewhat cool to my 22-year-old
daughter. I have passed on my CD's of The Lascivious Biddies and Erin
McKeown (which I discovered from ALN) to load on her ipod and she lent
me the Garden State soundtrack. Your young friends not only keep you up
to speed but through you help an even older geezer find musical
connections to his daughter. I gave up rock in the mid seventies and
listened mostly to classical music and more recently to jazz (I have
discovered some outstanding female jazz vocalists thanks to you) but
finding out about some of the recent eclectic and alternative music out
there is great fun. Thanks!
Like I always say, this is a full-service blog.
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TT: Off the aisle
From Playbill:
John Simon, who has been theatre critic at New York magazine for newly 40 years, has been dismissed from that position, the critic told Playbill.com.
"I expected it," he said May 10, when asked if New York editor Adam Moss' decision took him by surprise. "Then again, my birthday is coming up, so I didn't think it was a very good birthday present."
Jeremy McCarter, theatre critic for the New York Sun, was named as Simon's replacement. McCarter's first review for New York will appear June 1.
Simon is known equally for his considerable erudition, his longevity as a critic (he is 79) and his vituperative style. His stinging reviews—particularly his sometimes vicious appraisals of performers' physical appearances—have periodically raised calls in the theatre community for his removal.
The timing of the firing is somewhat ironic. This fall, Applause Books will publish three volumes of Simon's collected works: one on his theatre writing, one on music, one on film.
Simon also said he's not ready to lay down the pen. "I still feel quite chipper. I don't feel my writing has somehow faded. If I felt tired, I'd stop, but I don't feel that way.”
Read the whole thing here.
I'm sorry to see this happen. As the saying goes, John Simon has forgotten more about theater than I'll ever know. For all the controversies he stirred up over the years, he was and is a critic of the very first rank, not least because of his ability to place what he sees on stage in so wide and deeply informed a cultural context. Even when I disagree with him, I take no one else's opinions as seriously.
Simon's departure from New York will be news. It should be.
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TT: Those other awards
I have an interesting chore ahead of me this afternoon. I'll be attending my first meeting as a newly elected member of the New York Drama Critics' Circle, which is not a social club: we convene each May to vote on the annual Drama Critics' Circle awards, which will be announced May 24 at a bash to be held at the Algonquin, with Edward Albee as our special guest. Don't expect any blogging about our double-secret conclave, though, unless a fistfight breaks out, in which case I'm on it like a bonnet.
Coincidentally, this year's Tony nominations were announced yesterday. (For a complete list, go here.) According to Jesse McKinley of the New York Times, the big story
was who didn't get asked to the party:
In the competition for leading actor in a play, Denzel Washington, appearing at the Belasco as Brutus in "Julius Caesar," was left off the list, as was Jeff Goldblum, who plays a curious cop in Martin McDonagh's dark comedy "The Pillowman." In the leading-actress category, meanwhile, Jessica Lange was passed over for her performance as the mother in a revival of "The Glass Menagerie," and Natasha Richardson was overlooked for her work in another Tennessee Williams revival, "A Streetcar Named Desire."
None of this, of course, was at all surprising to anyone who keeps a reasonably close eye on theater in New York. The real surprises will come when the awards are handed out on June 5. In the meantime, I thought it might be amusing to do a little preliminary handicapping, so here are my personal picks for the major prizes, accompanied by a smattering of cynical who's-really-gonna-win commentary à la Addison DeWitt, who is soooo not my mentor:
BEST PLAY
• Michael Frayn, Democracy
• John Patrick Shanley, Doubt
• August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean
• Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman
In addition to being my own favorite, Doubt is also a fairly safe bet to win, though The Pillowman is a definite contender, while Democracy has the pseudo-intellectual Anglophile vote sewed up tight. Normally August Wilson would be a prime candidate as well, but my guess is that Radio Golf, the last installment in his ten-play cycle about blacks in America, will win the best-play prize if and when it finally makes it to Broadway (and regardless of whether it's any good).
BEST MUSICAL
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• The Light in the Piazza
• Monty Python's Spamalot
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
No contest, alas. Like the Oscars, the Tonys are very respectful of success (if not wholly subservient to it, as Denzel Washington just learned), and Spamalot, lame though it is, had a 99.7% attendance rate last week. The Light in the Piazza and Putnam County Spelling Bee are far more deserving, but they'll split the good-taste vote down the middle.
BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL
• Jeffrey Lane, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Craig Lucas, The Light in the Piazza
• Eric Idle, Monty Python's Spamalot
• Rachel Sheinkin, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Idle probably has it in the bag, for the reason specified above. Everybody loves Sheinkin's delightful book for Putnam County Spelling Bee, though, so don't count her out quite yet.
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
• David Yazbek, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Adam Guettel, The Light in the Piazza
• John Du Prez and Eric Idle, Monty Python's Spamalot
• William Finn, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
I'm pretty sure my pick will also be the winner—this one is Adam Guettel's consolation prize.
BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY
• Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
• Ernest Thompson, On Golden Pond
• Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men
A tough call, though it shouldn't be: Twelve Angry Men is a good revival of a fair play, On Golden Pond a pretty good revival of a bad play, and Virginia Woolf an uneven revival of a great play.
BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL
• La Cage aux Folles
• Pacific Overtures
• Sweet Charity
Your guess is as good as mine. Pacific Overtures deserves the prize, but Sweet Charity needs it in order to stay open, and I wouldn't be heartbroken if it won.
BEST SPECIAL THEATRICAL EVENT
• Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance!
• Laugh Whore
• 700 Sundays
• Whoopi: The 20th Anniversary Show
Another safe call, since Billy Crystal has been coining money with 700 Sundays. Too bad: Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore made me laugh harder than anything else I saw on Broadway all season.
BEST LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY
• Philip Bosco, Twelve Angry Men
• Billy Crudup, The Pillowman
• Bill Irwin, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• James Earl Jones, On Golden Pond
• Brían F. O'Byrne, Doubt
O'Byrne is brilliant and everyone in town knows it, but Jones (who's pretty damned good himself) will rack up most of the bravo-old-pro vote. We'll see.
BEST LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY
• Cherry Jones, Doubt
• Laura Linney, Sight Unseen
• Mary-Louise Parker, Reckless
• Phylicia Rashad, Gem of the Ocean
• Kathleen Turner, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Cherry Jones, by a mile.
BEST LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
• Hank Azaria, Monty Python's Spamalot
• Gary Beach, La Cage aux Folles
• Norbert Leo Butz, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Tim Curry, Monty Python's Spamalot
• John Lithgow, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
I smell another consolation prize coming: Norbert Leo Butz got huge, well-deserved buzz.
BEST LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
• Christina Applegate, Sweet Charity
• Victoria Clark, The Light in the Piazza
• Erin Dilly, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• Sutton Foster, Little Women, The Musical
• Sherie Rene Scott, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
A shoo-in. Victoria Clark is taking this one home, as well she should, though Foster and Scott were also excellent, while Applegate was seriously underrated by the critics (this one not included!).
BEST FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY
• Alan Alda, Glengarry Glen Ross
• Gordon Clapp, Glengarry Glen Ross
• David Harbour, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Liev Schreiber, Glengarry Glen Ross
• Michael Stuhlbarg, The Pillowman
Liev Schreiber ought to win, but he can't possibly come out on top with two other Glengarry Glen Ross actors nominated in the same category. David Harbour was very fine in Virginia Woolf, and I see him as the difference-splitting choice.
BEST FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY
• Mireille Enos, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Heather Goldenhersh, Doubt
• Dana Ivey, The Rivals
• Adriane Lenox, Doubt
• Amy Ryan, A Streetcar Named Desire
If Ryan doesn't get it, I'll stand in Times Square at high noon the next day and yell Stellaaaaaa! until curtain time. Had she not been nominated, though, I would have loved to see the prize go to Heather Goldenhersh, who has great things ahead of her.
BEST FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
• Dan Fogler, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
• Marc Kudisch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• Michael McGrath, Monty Python's Spamalot
• Matthew Morrison, The Light in the Piazza
• Christopher Sieber, Monty Python's Spamalot
I think Fogler might just pull this one off. On the other hand, why in hell wasn't David Hyde Pierce nominated? His performance of “You Can't Succeed on Broadway (If You Don't Have Any Jews)” was the only thing about Spamalot that did rate a prize.
BEST FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
• Joanna Gleason, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Celia Keenan-Bolger, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
• Jan Maxwell, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• Kelli O'Hara, The Light in the Piazza
• Sara Ramirez, Monty Python's Spamalot
The second toughest call of the night, but Keenan-Bolger's sweetly wistful performance has a decent shot.
BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY
• John Crowley, The Pillowman
• Scott Ellis, Twelve Angry Men
• Doug Hughes, Doubt
• Joe Mantello, Glengarry Glen Ross
The toughest call of the night, and rightly so. I'll be happy no matter who gets it.
BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL
• James Lapine, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
• Mike Nichols, Monty Python's Spamalot
• Jack O'Brien, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Bartlett Sher, The Light in the Piazza
I'd bet next month's rent on Nichols, who isn't undeserving, having done an exemplary job of turd-polishing on Spamalot. Nevertheless, James Lapine's staging of Putnam County Spelling Bee is masterly, and I'l be sorry when he loses, as he will. (Incidentally, Walter Bobbie should have been nominated for Sweet Charity, possibly in place of Bartlett Sher.)
And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen of the “About Last Night” Academy of Theatrical Kibitzers. Let the teasing commence first thing on the morning of June 6….
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TT: Only in Manhattan
At dinner last night I was served by a friendly brunette with a girl-next-door face who looked oddly familiar to me. Midway through the meal, the coin dropped, and I said to her, "Forgive me for staring, but you look just like an actress who got nominated for a Tony this morning."
"Who?" she asked.
"Celia Keenan-Bolger, for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee."
A complicated expression flashed across her pretty features. "Oh, I know," she said. "I do look like her. And I was up for that part, too, for the longest time. I so wanted it!"
I tipped extra.
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