About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Saturday, January 13, 2007
TT: Drama kings
I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal, not with a “Sightings” column (that’s next week) but as the guest contributor of the Journal’s “Five Best” books feature, whose participants are invited to name five favorite books in a category of their choosing. I chose theatrical biographies, and these were my picks:
• Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life
• Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (the one-volume abridgment)
• Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
• Moss Hart, Act One
• John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
The Journal has posted a free link to this piece. To read it, go here.
| Friday, January 12, 2007
TT: Historical hijinks
It’s another off-Broadway week for this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Verse Theater Manhattan’s The Germans in Paris and Second Stage’s The Scene:
The success of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” continues to bemuse me. How could a trilogy of plays about a group of 19th-century Russian intellectuals have become the talk of the town? If such miracles are possible, then perhaps “The Germans in Paris,” Jonathan Leaf’s thought-provoking comedy about the private lives of Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and Richard Wagner, will become the sleeper hit of the Off-Off Broadway season. I wouldn’t bet on it, but stranger things have happened.
Mr. Leaf first came to my notice with “The Caterers,” a flawed but promising play about Islamic terrorism. “The Germans in Paris,” which is being revived by Verse Theater Manhattan after a brief run two years ago at 59E59 Theatres, is a very different piece of work, a historical extravaganza spun out of a real-life coincidence: Heine, Marx and Wagner all spent time in Paris, where they became swept up in the same revolutionary crosscurrents described in “The Coast of Utopia.” So far as I know, Marx and Wagner never met, but they could have, and Heine knew both men well. Upon this “Travesties”-like foundation of fact, Mr. Leaf has erected an elaborate superstructure of speculation whose premise suggests a joke told by an egghead: Did you hear the one about the poet, the philosopher and the composer?...
Mr. Leaf has woven his web of fact and fiction with enviable skill, and the result is a sharp-witted comedy of manners that modulates neatly into high seriousness….
According to theatrical legend, anybody can write a good first act. I can’t, but I’ve definitely seen a lot of plays that were good until intermission and bad afterward. “The Water’s Edge,” Theresa Rebeck’s last play, was like that, and so is “The Scene,” a black comedy about an out-of-work actor of a certain age (Tony Shalhoub) who trashes his marriage to an ultra-competent TV producer (Patricia Heaton) by sleeping with an amoral young bimbo (Anna Camp). The first act is fast, funny and more than clever enough, and when the lights came back up I was sure I’d be filing a rave, but no sooner did the cast return to the stage than the plot ran out of steam….
No free link, so do the obvious—buy the damn paper—or, less obviously but more productively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my review, plus the rest of the Journal’s weekend arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
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TT: Life sentence
“I like Raleigh,” I told the limo driver who picked me up at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. He laughed. “All you New Yorkers come down here and talk about how much you like Raleigh," he said, "but I don’t notice any of you moving here.” That silenced me. It also set me to wondering: would it be possible for me to live happily in a medium-sized city?
Raleigh, to be sure, has much to offer the culture-conscious émigré. Carolina Ballet is a first-rate dance company. Quail Ridge Books & Music is one of America’s best independent bookstores. The North Carolina Museum of Art
isn’t exactly overburdened with masterpieces of modern art, but it does own a dozen excellent pieces by Joseph Cornell, Richard Diebenkorn, Marsden Hartley, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Joel Shapiro, Frank Stella, and Neil Welliver. (I briefly thought at one time of leaving the Teachout Museum en bloc to the NCMA, but I wouldn't want to stiff my friends!) Ms. Pratie Place and I dined wonderfully well at a classy pan-Asian restaurant called The Duck and Dumpling, and Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” was playing on the jukebox as I strolled into the Raleigh Times Bar for a post-rehearsal drink. As for the local barbecue, it’s to die for.
On the other hand, I was the only person on foot in downtown Raleigh at seven-thirty last night, not counting a couple of panhandlers. That matters more to me than you might think. Having spent the past decade and a half living in Manhattan, I now find it hard to imagine moving to a city that has no street life after dark. Perhaps I won’t continue to feel that way as I grow older, but I’m not exactly young anymore, and so far my love of city life has yet to diminish.
Am I destined to pass the rest of my days in New York, going to first nights and eating late suppers? Or will urban life lose its shiny savor? Maybe—but I wouldn’t bet on it. At least not yet.
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TT: Almanac
"The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form."
George Santayana, Skepticism and the Animal Mind
| Thursday, January 11, 2007
TT: Busman's holiday
Now that I’m a drama critic, I rarely get to go to working rehearsals, which I love to do, so it was a great pleasure to fly into the Raleigh-Durham airport last night, jump in a car, drive straight to the stage door of the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, and charge into the theater just in time to hear Robert Weiss, the artistic director of Carolina Ballet, speak the following words into a microphone: “Dancers, we’re going to try to go all the way through without stopping—unless there’s a train wreck.” I sighed with delight and plopped into a seat just behind Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the choreographers of Monet Impressions, who were furiously dictating last-minute fix-this notes to their assistants as the dancers on stage ran through Weiss’ “The Gardens at Giverny” and Taylor-Corbett’s “Picnic on the Grass.”
The New York Times ran a half-page preview
of Monet Impressions yesterday, so I’ll let their excellent reporter walk you through the show:
After carefully trolling the North Carolina Museum of Art’s “Monet in Normandy” exhibition, seeking inspiration for a new dance, the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett ended up using a painting not in the show: Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. That’s right, Monet’s—not Manet’s better-known 1863 painting of the same title, depicting a languid luncheon party of four, including unabashedly naked women, but Monet’s more decorous 1865-66 scene of a luncheon party of a dozen or so ladies and gentlemen, elegantly dressed.
“Whenever the word Impressionist is used, most people think first of Claude Monet, who depicted nature in a subjective and innovative way,” she said. “Conversely, his studies of people seem objective and detached. I wondered about ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.’ Who were these people, about to sit down outdoors to enjoy a meal together? What had they been doing moments before? What were they feeling?”
The dance that resulted from her musings, “Picnic on the Grass,” will be the first part of the Carolina Ballet’s “Monet Impressions,” opening Jan. 11 at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. The program, which also features “The Gardens at Giverny,” by Robert Weiss, the Carolina Ballet’s artistic director, coincides with the final weekend of the museum’s substantial Monet exhibition...
The company’s resident set designer, Jeff A.R. Jones, created a painted translucent scrim that can overlay either of two painted backdrops to suggest a changing Impressionist landscape without recreating each painting. For “Picnic” a drop of a tree trunk and leaves, created from woven strips of fabric for additional texture, is suspended over a hazier backdrop, evoking part of “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” For “The Gardens at Giverny,” Monet’s rose arbors and waterlily paintings are evoked.
That sounds ambitious, and it looks…well, astonishing. This morning I went to the museum to see “Monet in Normandy,” having spent the previous evening gazing with mounting amazement at Monet Impressions, and my first impression of the ballet was confirmed by my hour-long visit to the exhibition: I don’t know when I’ve seen a more complete fusion of dance, décor, and music. To be sure, I was watching a dress rehearsal, not the real thing, but even when accompanied by the frenzied mutterings of anxious artists determined to get it right on the night, Monet Impressions was so unabashedly gorgeous to behold that it knocked me flat.
The two dances are completely different in character. Taylor-Corbett’s evocation of “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” set to Poulenc’s suavely bittersweet music, is charming in the very best sense of that oft-misused word—Sunday in the Park with Claude, so to speak. Weiss’s ballet, accompanied by Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun and Nocturnes and the lushly Franco-Wagnerian music of Ernest Chausson, is more abstract, as befits a choreographer who learned his trade from George Balanchine, but no less immediately appealing to the eye and ear. Afterward he asked me what I thought, and I replied, “That one definitely passes the ooh-and-aah test.”
That such an extravaganza should have been created in Raleigh will be surprising only to those who know nothing of Carolina Ballet. I’ve been covering the company for the better part of a decade now, and I know what Weiss and his collaborators can do. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal back in 2002:
The story of Carolina Ballet is, to put it mildly, improbable. Started from scratch in 1997, it has grown to the point where it will be spending more than $5 million to present 84 performances this year. By big-city standards, of course, that’s peanuts: New York City Ballet has a budget of $46.6 million. But you can cook a lot of tasty things with peanuts if you hire gourmet chefs. The company’s fast-growing repertory includes both modern classics (one recent program featured Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco” and Antony Tudor’s “Lilac Garden”) and new works by principal guest choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett and whiz kid Christopher Wheeldon. It has performed in Budapest and at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. It has collaborated with the cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci and the surrealist artist Patricia Nix…
Above all, Carolina Ballet has Robert Weiss. He knows Balanchine’s demanding neoclassical style cold, but instead of making the abstract “plotless” dances that were his mentor’s trademark, Weiss specializes in narrative ballets modeled after Balanchine’s 1962 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. Like that deeply conservative yet radically innovative masterwork, Weiss’ “Carmen” and “Romeo and Juliet” emphasize character-driven virtuoso dancing over the glitzy pageantry that dominates—and deadens—most of today’s full-evening story ballets.
This time around I came to Raleigh not as a critic but as a civilian, more than happy to simply sit in my seat and watch Weiss and Taylor-Corbett do their stuff. I’ll be at the premiere of Monet Impresssions tonight, accompanied by a local blogger friend, and I won’t be taking any notes. I’m just going to look. That’s my kind of night off.
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TT: Reality is the word
No, I didn’t watch the debut of Grease: You’re the One That I Want—I was otherwise occupied—but I wrote a “Sightings” column about it for The Wall Street Journal last fall. In case you didn’t see that piece, here are some pertinent excerpts:
It was inevitable: “American Idol” is coming to Broadway. Not literally, of course, but “You’re the One That I Want,” the reality TV series in production at NBC, is the next best thing, a program whose viewers will pick a pair of unknowns to star in a Broadway musical. The musical in question is “Grease,” the rock-and-roll romp that ran from 1972 to 1980, then returned to the Great White Way in 1994 and played for four more years. It might actually be good—Kathleen Marshall, the director, staged the brilliant Broadway revivals of “The Pajama Game” and “Wonderful Town”—but even if it’s bad, it’ll be big. Six million Brits watched the BBC series on which “You’re the One That I Want” is based, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” If the NBC version is comparably popular in this country, it will be seen by 30 million Americans. That’s a whole lot of potential ticket-buyers.
Is “Grease” the future of Broadway? If so, it’s a “future” that to some extent has already happened. Many theatrical producers are using focus groups, tracking polls, and other sophisticated research tools to make marketing decisions about the shows they present. In the past, such information has only been used to develop ad campaigns—but as the public response to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” made clear, it can also be used to make artistic decisions….
Is that such a bad thing? After all, “Grease” isn’t Shakespeare, or even Neil Simon. It’s an innocuous confection whose sole purpose is to amuse, and I won’t get even slightly bent out of shape if 30 million TV viewers should suddenly take an interest in the burning question of who will play Sandy and Danny in the Broadway revival. As Samuel Johnson told us long ago, “The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice./The Drama’s Laws the Drama’s Patrons give,/For we that live to please, must please to live.” In any case, there are better places than Broadway to see serious theater, not only in New York but in Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and the countless other American cities where first-rate regional companies can be found. Anyone who looks to Broadway for creative leadership is looking under the wrong bushel.
I’m not a cultural relativist. I believe devoutly in the superiority of Shakespeare to Neil Simon. But I’m also a realist, and I keep a close eye on the myriad ways in which information-age capitalism is transforming American life by maximizing consumer choice. That’s why I’m interested in “You’re the One That I Want.” I don’t know whether “Grease” will be better or worse for having been cast by popular demand—but I have no doubt that its opening night will mark a sea change in the culture of commercial theater in America.
Needless to say, I’ll be there.
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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 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:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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 Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes May 12)
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)
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 18)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Feb. 10)
CLOSING SOON:
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Jan. 29)
• Two Trains Running (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Jan. 28)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
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TT: Almanac
"Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy."
Brooks Atkinson, Theater Arts (August 1956)
| Wednesday, January 10, 2007
OGIC: Night thoughts
Heading toward the holidays, I anticipated being much more in evidence around here. Following the hectic build-up to Christmas, it seemed, a few quiet, blessedly blank days were in the offing—good for blogging as well as other essential activities too often deferred during life-as-usual: learning to knit; getting good and enveloped by the second season of The Wire, which has been sitting here keeping my Netflix subscription at a standstill for the last two or three months; and reading a book in longer sessions than the seven or eight minutes that expire, on a typical night, between when I shimmy beneath the covers and when my eyelids flutter, droop, and slam shut. For all these reasons, and for the overarching sense of exemption from many of life's normal demands, that week between the holidays has always been a sweet little stretch of exceptions to most of the usual rules.
Sweet, this year, it wasn't to be. Beginning with the scary but ultimately unharmful accident of an elderly relative on Christmas night, the last week of 2006 was crowded with illness and hospital visits. By New Year's it seemed, at least, that all of these incidents had ended well. But last week my grandmother, who is ninety-two years old, wound up back in the hospital. Though she's home again now, the doctors don't believe her condition will improve. And I'd take workaday life as I used to know it, with all its impositions and little assaults on time and mind, gladly.
Somewhere during the six years since I last lost a grandparent, I realize, I've changed. Losing my grandfathers in 1996 and 2001 was difficult, of course. I mourned them and learned an absolute new way of missing someone. With my grandmother's health failing now, I feel my own mortality implicated, and that of everyone I love—because I'm an older person now but also, I think, because past a certain age the end of a life ceases to seem premature, exceptional, unfair. There's no sense of the injustice of circumstances to distract you from facing the necessity of the event: you can focus on the "why now?" instead of the "why?" It's a colder, harder, more inexorable proof of the one inevitability. Besides which, you don't miss someone any less just because they lived a long life.
Changing the subject, but only sort of, who out there saw Children of Men who has also read P.D. James's book? I read perhaps a quarter of the book before venturing out to see the movie a couple of weeks ago. The latter experience was a frustrating one that has sent me back to the book fairly hungrily to see the founding concept of both book and movie—that the human race has gone almost two decades without being able to procreate—treated with some curiosity and imagination (I'm now about a third of the way through).
In Alfonso Cuarón's film, this germ serves merely as an occasion to depict and decry a fairly standard-issue vision of a future fascist dystopia. In some way that goes unspecified, we gather, the aging and near-extinction of the race has upset and depressed people; from that despair (and, perhaps more directly, from a governmental predisposition toward fascism) has sprung nearly worldwide catastrophe. Before infertility kills off the race, the movie suggests, the race will destroy itself out of rage and fear. That's a plausible enough extrapolation, I suppose, but it does by design foreclose the possibility of exploring the specificity of the sorrowful, wondering situation James posited.
It wasn't all bad. Cinematography and performances gave the first half a real pull before the movie descended into a tedious, overwrought tedious chase sequence during which nothing beyond pursuit and evasion develops—but I didn't feel much. By contrast, the ruminations of James's deeply flawed main character are less spectacular but entirely more moving. They're as illuminating of our own loneliness and reaching for consolation as of those of a dying race:
I can still find pleasure, more intellectual than sensual, in the effulgence of an Oxford spring, the blossoms in Belbroughton Road which seem lovelier every year, sunlight moving on stone walls, horse-chestnut trees in full bloom, tossing in the wind, the smell of a bean field in flower, the first snow-drops, the fragile compactness of a tulip. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it. I tell myself this, but do I believe it when the pleasure now comes so rarely and, when it does, is so indistinguishable from pain? I can understand how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life. But our minds reach back through centuries for the reassurance of our ancestry and, without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.
Peter Suderman is a more lucid voice of dissent from the critical consensus on the film; his review can be read here.
Have a good week.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 10, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy—not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether—where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei—I am surprised it is not forbidden."
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 10, 2007 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 9, 2007
TT: Goings on about (and out of) town
On Saturday I went to DC Moore Gallery to see the Jane Wilson exhibition about which I blogged last week. I was so taken with one of Wilson's watercolors, “Breaking Light,” that I bought it on the spot—the first time I’ve ever bought a piece of art that was hanging at a show. You can’t view "Breaking Light" on line, alas, but it's still hanging at the gallery, and if you should happen to buy the catalogue, you can see it reproduced in the “Works on Paper” section.
Also included in the catalogue is the transcript of an interview with Wilson that contains this illuminating remark:
Although I was thoroughly intrigued and influenced by abstraction per se and, in fact, painted quite a few works in the ’50s that might be considered Abstract Expressionist, I finally realized that I really liked subject matter and that I really liked the history of art. I wanted to pursue the natural world in ways that were meaningful to me and not ridden by theory or “position-taking.” This meant going directly to traditional subjects and finding out how I might develop them. I became an avid museumgoer and liked looking back. I was beginning to realize that all of the artists of the past whom I admired in a bone-deep way had used the past as a source of the future.
On Monday morning I wrote two pieces, a “Five Best” article for this Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal and a twenty-minute speech that I’ll be delivering tonight at an Actors’ Fund of America dinner. I then met an opera critic for lunch at Good Enough to Eat, during which we discussed the opera libretto I may or may not be writing.
I spent the afternoon booking travel (about which more below) and answering my mail, including an e-mail from the press rep of a theater company in Maryland who saw this posting and invited me to come see one of her company’s shows in May. I accepted. Talk about cause and effect!
After dinner I strolled down to the ArcLight Theater to catch the opening-night performance of an off-Broadway show, Jonathan Leaf’s The Germans in Paris, which I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Journal.
Today I write, go to the gym, and give my speech. Tomorrow afternoon I'm off to Raleigh to see the world premiere of Carolina Ballet's Monet Impressions, an evening of dances by Robert Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, and take a peek at the North Carolina Museum of Art's Monet retrospective.
I fly back to New York on Friday, then depart once more on Saturday morning to see shows in Boston, Washington, and Arlington. I plan to blog from the road, but irregularly, so don't be surprised if I drop out of sight from time to time.
Over to you, OGIC!
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TT: Almanac
"Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues."
Franz Kafka, notebook entry, Nov. 30, 1917
| Monday, January 8, 2007
TT: So you want to get reviewed?
If you read my Wall Street Journal drama column, you know that I take regional theater very seriously indeed. In fact, I’m the only New York-based drama critic who routinely covers productions all over America. In addition to covering Broadway and off-Broadway openings, I reviewed plays in fourteen states and the District of Columbia in 2006. I expect to range no less widely in 2007.
As I wrote in my “Sightings” column last June:
The time has come for American playgoers—and, no less important, arts editors—to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.
I’ve just started working on my travel schedule for the summer of 2007. How can you increase your chances of persuading me to come see your company? Here’s an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see—along with some free suggestions for improving the way you reach out to the press:
• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I’m also more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, especially if I’m already coming to your city to see another show. In addition, I don’t review dinner theater, and it’s unusual (but not unprecedented) for me to visit children’s theaters or companies that produce only musicals.
• You must produce a minimum of four shows each season… That doesn't apply to summer festivals, but it’s comparatively rare for me to cover a festival that doesn’t produce at least three shows a year.
• …and most of them have to be serious. I won’t put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if you specialize in such regional-theater staples as The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word "magnolias" in the title, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.
• Repeat performances. I almost never cover new or newish plays I’ve already reviewed in New York—especially if I panned them. The chances of my coming to town to see your production of The Clean House or Rabbit Hole, for instance, are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you’re not reading my Wall Street Journal drama column, you probably ought to be.)
• Repertory is everything... I won't visit an out-of-town company I've never seen to review a play by an author of whom I've never heard. What I look for is an imaginative, wide-ranging mix of revivals of major plays—including comedies—and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I admire. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Amy Freed, Brian Friel, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Austin Pendleton, Harold Pinter, Oren Safdie, John Patrick Shanley, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.
I also have a select list of older plays about which I'd like to write that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Man and Superman, Rhinoceros, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, What the Butler Saw, or anything by Jean Anouilh, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, or August Wilson, drop me a line.
• ...and so is timing. Many Broadway shows open between the end of February and the middle of May, in time to qualify for that year's Tony nominations. During that period, I rarely have time or space to review out-of-town openings, no matter how enticing they may sound. On the other hand, I'm always looking for interesting shows to review in late December, January, the first half of February, the second half of May, the first half of June, and September.
• I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a three- or four-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city.) If you’re the publicist of the Podunk Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of Our Town, your best bet is to point out that TheaterPodunk just happens to be doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to Chicago instead.
• Web sites matter—a lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you’re doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I’ll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can't spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn’t mean I won’t consider reviewing you—I know appearances can be deceiving—but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.
If you want to keep traveling critics like me happy, make absolutely sure that the home page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information:
(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates
(2) A link to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions
(3) A "CONTACT US" link that leads directly to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses—starting with the address of your press representative)
(4) A link to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map
(5) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!)
• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don't want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.
• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address often gets lost in the kudzu of random press releases. I get a lot of spam at my “About Last Night” mailbox, too, but not as much as I do at the Journal.
Finally,
• Mention this posting. I like publicists who do their homework.
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TT: The fine art of distinctions
The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my most recent “Sightings” column, which ran in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday's paper:
What is intellectual property? Who owns it—and who deserves to get paid for it? Playgoers and music lovers don’t often have occasion to ask such rarefied questions, but they’ve lately become important to the producers of a Broadway musical and the members of a British rock group.
• In November the director, choreographer and designers of the Broadway production of “Urinetown” publicly accused the Carousel Dinner Theatre of Akron, Ohio, and the Mercury Theater of Chicago of copying their work without permission and demanded royalty payments in return. The Akron and Chicago companies denied the charges and sued the Broadway production team for defamation.
• Last month a London judge awarded 40% of the copyright of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” to Matthew Fisher, the group’s ex-organist. Mr. Fisher, who had asked for 50%, doesn’t claim to have written the song, but he did write the Bach-like organ countermelody heard on the group’s 1967 recording of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which sold 10 million copies. Judge William Blackburne called the countermelody “a distinctive and significant contribution to the overall composition and, quite obviously, the product of skill and labor on the part of the person who created it.”
At first glance these two cases may appear unrelated—but I wouldn’t be surprised if they both become landmarks in the evolution of copyright law….
Don’t stop now—there’s much more (including, believe it or not, a highly relevant plug for Erin McKeown’s new CD, Sing You Sinners).
To read the whole thing, go here.
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TT: Almanac
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it."
Beatrice Webb, diary entry, March 8, 1885
| Friday, January 13, 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 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:
• 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)
• 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 July 2, 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)
• The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
• In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Jan. 28)
• Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)
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TT: The old-fashioned way
I’m back from a quick playgoing trip to Washington, D.C., just in time to review Nilo Cruz’s Beauty of the Father in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
Nilo Cruz, the prolific Cuban-American playwright, didn’t make his Broadway debut until 2003, when “Anna in the Tropics,” which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, had a three-month run at the Royale Theatre. Though it got mixed reviews, I liked “Anna in the Tropics” very much and resolved to keep an eye on Mr. Cruz thereafter. Now he’s back in town with “Beauty of the Father,” a play about Emiliano, a bisexual artist (Ritchie Coster) whose reunion with his estranged daughter (Elizabeth Rodriguez) hits the skids when she falls for his boyfriend-protégé (Pedro Pascal).
In spite of the contemporary flavor of Mr. Cruz’s plot, his stagecraft is delightfully old-fashioned. His characters are forever waxing poetic, reeling off elaborate soliloquies at the drop of a paintbrush…
In addition, I paid a return visit to The Light in the Piazza:
Long-running musicals have a nasty way of developing quality-control problems over time, especially when the members of the original cast move on. “The Light in the Piazza” was my favorite musical of the 2004-05 season, but I hadn’t seen it since last April and was wondering how it was holding up, especially given the fact that three of the four stars had since been replaced by new faces (Victoria Clark is still in the cast). So I went back for a second helping on Saturday, and was pleased to find that it was every bit as good as I’d remembered….
No link, so take yourself to the nearest newsstand and shell out one thin dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with plenty of other art-related stories).
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TT: Almanac
"I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me."
Evelyn Waugh, Paris Review interview (1962)
| Thursday, January 12, 2006
OGIC: The man who knew about knowing too much
Following are passages from two mid-late Henry James works that concern things we know but, for reasons emotional and social, don't quite own. When Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew opens, Maisie is six, her parents recently divorced, Moddle her nurse.
It seemed to have to do with something else that Moddle often said: "You feel the strain—that's where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know.
Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her he felt it too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself: "Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the air of being unduly, almost painfully stretched, it never presented that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly to her nurse's manner about them, the meaning for which these things had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said about her mother—things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said about her father.
Maisie is a deep little vessel for knowledge, even knowledge she can't yet understand. Her eventual strategy for handling the volatile stuff—for both fending off the parental versions and more efficiently capturing the genuine article—is to play dumb, to appear "not to take things in":
The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.
I think James intends this notion of a necessarily secretive inner self as both general and specific. The idea of concealment is inseparable from the idea of an inner self, but for a character like Maisie the role of concealment is heightened. It is, as well, for the unnamed telegraphist who is the protagonist of James's novella "In the Cage":
It has occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively—though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered—to see anyone come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men—the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.
The heartbreaking circularity of that opening paragraph has always gotten to me. A few pages later, James puts a finer point on her rough similarity to Maisie:
The girl was blasée; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to "care," odd caprices of curiosity.…It was at once one of her most cherished complaints and secret supports that people didn't understand her.
There's almost no character in James who doesn't at some point dissemble about what they know, but for certain types of characters such negotiations are more fraught. Small children, working-class men and women, the ill, the dispossessed: when such characters crop up in James, they tend to share this combination of heightened receptivity—a marked capacity for taking things in, for knowing—and an instinctual or strategic disinclination to be known. A form of self-protection, the latter. "In the Cage," which plays out a bit in the vein of a Victorian-era Nurse Betty, shows what happens when that guard is dropped, when the telegraphist comes from behind the lattice and makes herself available for knowing, but in the most peculiar and ill-fated way. You can read the e-text of the amazing "In the Cage" here. And then the next time someone dismisses James as writing only about the upper classes, you can make short work of them.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 12, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 10, 2006
TT: Almanac
"I was driven to writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a decent living."
Evelyn Waugh, "General Conversation: Myself" (1937)
| Monday, January 9, 2006
TT: Almanac
"Heavy apparatus has been at work in the last hundred years to enervate and stultify the imaginative faculties. First, realistic novels and plays, then the cinema have made the urban mentality increasingly subject to suggestion. It lapses effortlessly into a trance-like escape from its condition. Great popularity in fiction and film is only attained by works in which reader and audience can transpose themselves and be vicariously endangered, loved and applauded."
Evelyn Waugh, "St. Helena Empress" (1951)
| Friday, January 7, 2005
TT: Touch that dial! Please!
I’m on the air today. To be exact, I’ll be sharing a microphone with John Schaefer this afternoon on WNYC’s Soundcheck. Here’s the official version of what we’ve got cooked up:
Rounding out Soundcheck’s week-long traversal of the musical highs and lows of 2004, music and drama critic Terry Teachout joins us to discuss some of his artistic highlights of 2004. From Diana Krall’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow”, to the reopening of the MoMA, to some of the New York Philharmonic’s most successful performances, Teachout and host John Schaefer will cover the year’s best. We also ask our listeners for their highlights. You can call in during the show or e-mail us at: soundcheck@wnyc.org.
Soundcheck airs in New York weekdays at two p.m. EST on 93.9 FM. You don’t have to be a New Yorker to join in the fun, though—WNYC can also be heard live via streaming audio by Web surfers around the world. To learn more about today’s broadcast, to “tune in” online, or to listen after the fact to the archived version of today’s broadcast, click here.
As Mr. Osgood says, see you on the radio.
(P.S. The photo of me on the Soundcheck Web site is a personal favorite.)
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TT: No need to be an ogre
I took two weeks off from my Wall Street Journal drama column, but now I’m back this morning with reviews of Under the Bridge, the new Kathie Lee Gifford-David Pomeranz musical, and Daniel Goldfarb’s Modern Orthodox, which stars Craig “Music Man” Bierko, Jason “American Pie” Biggs, and Molly “Pretty in Pink” Ringwald.
Regarding Under the Bridge, grab your hat and hold on tight:
When the word got out that Kathie Lee Gifford had written the book and lyrics for a “family-friendly” musical that was all set to open Off Broadway, the resulting rumble of lip-smacking anticipation reminded me of nothing so much as the way many Manhattanites felt when it first hit them that Martha Stewart might actually do time. This, after all, is the town that brought you “Avenue Q,” a show so cynical that it contains a number called “Schadenfreude” (“Right now you are down and out and feeling really crappy/And when I see how sad you are/It sort of makes me…happy!”). I don’t have any strong opinions either way about Mrs. Gifford, but most of my friends affect to find her relentlessly cheery peppiness revolting, so much so that I couldn’t find anyone to accompany me to “Under the Bridge,” which opened last night at the Zipper Theatre.
Well, folks, I hate to disappoint you, but…I liked it.
“Under the Bridge” is a musical adaptation of Natalie Savage Carlson’s “The Family Under the Bridge,” the still-popular 1958 children’s book in which Armand, a homeless Paris bum (played in the show by Ed Dixon), comes to the rescue of the freshly widowed Madame Calcet (Jacquelyn Piro) and her three children (Alexa Ehrlich, Maggie Watts and Andrew Blake Zutty), whose landlord has put them out on the street because they can no longer pay the rent. It’s a sentimental heartwarmer of a tale, complete with the expected happy ending, and for the most part Mrs. Gifford has transferred it to the stage efficiently….
My feelings about Modern Orthodox were rather more complicated:
Daniel Goldfarb’s “Modern Orthodox,” now playing at Dodger Stages, is a very commercial comedy about a very interesting subject: the squirmy discomfort that certain secular Jews feel in the presence of their believing brethren….
Ben and Hershel are at once contemptuous of and oddly attracted to one another. Just as Ben is repelled by Hershel’s straight-from-the-shoulder vulgarity, so is Hershel horrified by Ben’s “ersatz” Jewishness: “Are you conservative?” “Reform. Er, secular, really. Whatever you’d call a high holiday Jew.” “A gentile.” (Pow!) Yet each sees in the other something he lacks—and for which he longs.
All this might well have added up to scaldingly hot stuff, but Mr. Goldfarb has opted for Neil Simon-type punchlines over Philip Roth-type satire….
You were expecting maybe a link? To read the whole thing—of which there’s a lot more—buy today’s Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the reasonably priced online version of the Journal. (That’s how I read me.)
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TT: Elsewhere
• Publishers Weekly has a new editor, and major changes are in the offing. Sarah explains it all for you:
Is the magazine actually obsolete? Not as long as they keep the focus on what people pay most attention to—the reviews. One thing I have noticed of late is that more and more of these reviews appear closer to the publication date, which seems rather pointless—if it's a trade publication, shouldn't it be ahead of the curve of newspaper reviews or online pundits? A month is too short a lead time; two or three might work better in order to keep PW as a leading contributor to industry dialogue instead of morphing into a dinosaur….
• Tyler sends an open letter to the Big Cheese at the Museum of Modern Art:
You've got operational problems, Glenn. The crowds in your museum are so massive that it's endangering the art. I saw people bumping into sculptures, even paintings, because the galleries were so crowded. And you need more guards—the fourth floor galleries and the contemporary galleries were so full of people that anyone who wanted to touch a painting could. Heck, I saw women with strollers bumping into the art. If Gordon Matta-Clark was alive, he'd be comin' after you with a chainsaw after what I saw people doing to his work in your museum.
And the cameras, Glenn. You must ban cameras from the building. I must have seen about 100 flashes go off in five hours. The guards simply can't keep up with every camera flash that happens. It's bad for the art and it's bad for the viewing experience of everyone else in the room….
• Jolly Days sharply reduces the number of degrees separating Renata Tebaldi from Jason Alexander:
Renata Tebaldi’s death sent me surfing to Apple’s iTunes store. I purchased what is a high point in human expression, certainly in 20th century western performance, Tebaldi’s O mio babbino caro. This painfully beautiful, far-too-short piece, sitting in the midst of a comic opera that could have been plotted by Larry David — amazing….
This Puccini piece is almost more perfect for its surprising launching pad: Gianni Schicchi. Puccini’s genius enlivens an ancient tale derived from a 14th century commentary on Dante’s Florence. (The plot is often incorrectly associated with a passage in Dante’s Divine Comedy) It could easily be a plot concocted by Seinfeld’s George to get Susan’s money — with Kramer mucking it up again no doubt….
That’s what we recovering musicians call an enharmonic modulation….
• My competitor-pal Robert Gottlieb, author of that other Balanchine book, has a damned good roundup of the year in dance in his New York Observer column:
The year ended with a bang, not a whimper. The Trocks—O.K., fact-checkers, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—turned up for two weeks of fun and games at the Joyce, and even though there were longueurs, they gave us a very needed shot in the arm. Because, let’s face it, 2004 was a bumpy ride….
If you’re even halfway interested in ballet or modern dance, this one’s an absolute must-read.
UPDATE: For more on the Trocks, go here.
• Rachel Howard, who blogs at Footnotes, is about to publish a memoir (which I intend to read the second it comes out), and the prospect of going public about a dark episode in her past is causing her to think some interesting thoughts about blogging:
I’m not hesitant to share unflattering details about myself, at least not in hardback. Yet posting on this website—so much less exposing—still feels like such an unnatural and worrisome process. I didn’t come to blogging freely; my husband, a political blog addict, insisted I should do it and found the designer for this site. The blog has proven useful: It aggregates my freelance work and gives me an online calling card. But I’ve never truly taken to it. Not for me the casually confidential working diary of a Terry Teachout or the biting, devil-may-care running commentary of an Old Hag. Every time I type an entry I have to think “Is this interesting to anyone but me? Does it tell too much about me? Too little?” and worst of all, “Why am I doing this?” And usually the true answer is because I think I should. As for why I think I should, I’ll leave the further psychologizing to the therapist’s office.
Why the reticence online when I’m so unguarded in my memoir? I blame the conversational nature of blogging. I’m not shy, but I’m not a chatty person. I can fake outgoingness at a party for about as long as it takes to greet the hostess, and by forty-five minutes I’m trying to nudge my husband toward the door. I detest talking about myself except with known friends, or even talking about my opinions, and if pressed to make small talk at a social gathering, I usually end up interviewing others. Writing has always been different. In writing a memoir or a novel, I’m not forcing myself upon anyone; no one has to nod along with fake interest. If I work hard enough on a page, someone may want to read it. If I fail to engage them, they can put it down….
Next week at “About Last Night”: the unvarnished truth about my sex life, in five daily installments! (O.K., maybe we’ll do Our Girl’s sex life instead.)
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TT: Almanac
“Art depends on the solitude of inspired, talented, or neurotic egotists. In its expression, it may ease their agonies (for half an hour); it may bring delight and consolation to some—those hearing Mahler’s Ninth one night in San Francisco. But Mahler’s Ninth on that occasion did not house one homeless person. Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, unequalled in its antiwar sentiments, was prelude to a fresh war. The moment art finds or claims any utility it is dragged before the court of justification, and that is a forlorn process. I think it is correct to see, and insist, that art demands the single-minded, profitless dedication of time, life, and materials to the quest.”
David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood
| Thursday, January 6, 2005
TT: Almanac
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
| Wednesday, January 5, 2005
TT: P.P.C.
If you don't mind, I believe I'll take Thursday off. I'm feeling a bit fried from the cumulative effects of the past few weeks' labors, and I've got to write my Wall Street Journal column first thing in the morning.
I'm not sure when my trusty co-blogger gets back to Chicago, but when she does I know she'll have tales of her own to tell. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday....
Anyway, later. Go read some other blog. You know where to find 'em.
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TT: In or out?
I was never an admirer, much less a fan, of Susan Sontag, but I confess to being fascinated by the retrospective brouhaha over whether the New York Times should have outed her—which it didn’t—in its long, unabashedly admiring obituary. Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan has been linking to much of the relevant post-obit commentary, and today he’s posted a long and telling excerpt from a Sontag interview conducted in 2000:
She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men." She will talk about her bisexuality quite openly now. It's simple, she says. "As I've become less attractive to men, so I've found myself more with women. It's what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out." She doesn't have a lover now, she lives alone. The rumours about her and the photographer Annie Leibovitz are, she says, without foundation. They are close friends.
Maybe it sounds foolish, she says. "Maybe everyone will think I have an aberrant life, or a low sex drive. Maybe I am consigning myself to the asexual here. But speaking candidly, and only for myself, there are so many things in my life now that are more important to me than my sexuality. My relationship with my son, David. My writing. Even my moral passions seem to me to be far more defining than my erotic life. People can conclude from this what they want."
(You’ll find lots of other interesting Sontag-related stuff on Sullivan’s site, but his permalinks don’t always point directly to specific postings, so the best thing to do is go there, scroll down, and keep scrolling.)
Should the Times have described Sontag as a lesbian, or bisexual, or however you want to put it? Speaking as a biographer, I think it’s absurd not to be frank about such matters. Regardless of a person’s wishes, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed, and when the person in question is important, it’s no less important to tell the truth, insofar as it's known or can be determined. I once read a long, posthumously published biography of the American composer Samuel Barber in which the words “homosexual” and “gay” were nowhere to be found, even though everybody in the music business knew perfectly well that Barber was gay (and even though the author had written at length about a goodly number of his lovers). That’s just crazy.
At the same time, though, I think biographers—and writers of obituaries—should be careful about engaging in the sort of idiot reductionism one typically finds in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography.” What Sontag said in that interview is worth taking to heart—and not just in her own case. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was definitely a complicated woman, too complicated to be summed up in a single word. So am I. So are you.
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TT: Shoutout
My good friend Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is yanking my chain:
I disagree with my esteemed AJ colleague Terry Teachout about the lack of usefulness of specialized critical fields. There is value to readers in specialized knowledge, in a critic spending hours and hours studying, thinking about and examining a certain field….what about providing context, insight and original thinking about contemporary art when the premiere of Alias is on at 8 tonight and there's a new novel to be read? What about doing the legwork to look at all that a critic has to look at in order to speak with some level of insight?
Er, did I really say critical specialization wasn't useful? Because it is, or can be, for all the good reasons Tyler mentions—but only so long as the specialist remains conscious and appreciative of the place of his specialty in the larger world of art. Critics who lack or lose this awareness become provincial, which is the curse of certain branches of criticism (dance in particular). What do they know of modernism who only modern art know? Answer: not enough.
I don't offer my own experience as a model for all critics, by the way. I started out years ago as a critical specialist (in music), but gradually began writing about other things that interested me simply because...I wanted to. And I hope I'm properly modest about what I can and can't do. To quote from my introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader, "I am all too aware that when I discuss any art form other than music, it is as a more or less well-informed amateur, not a practitioner. The only claim that I would make for myself is that because I chose not to remain a specialist, I thereby acquired a feel for the unity of the arts that has had its own value." At least I think so, anyway!
Yes, I do believe good critics should be encouraged to write outside their specialties. (Bad critics, conversely, should be encouraged to take up other lines of work.) But specialization in and of itself is no bad thing, so long as it doesn't lead in bad directions. My favorite art critic, Fairfield Porter, was in one sense the ultimate specialist—a professional painter who wrote about art when not making it. He was also a part-time poet and a deeply thoughtful man whose aesthetic interests (and knowledge) ranged very widely. Don't you wish he'd taken the time to write on occasion about other art forms as well? I do, just as I’m excited that the anything-but-provincial music critic John Rockwell will soon become the chief dance critic of the New York Times. He may be wrong—a lot—but at least he’ll be interesting.
One more quote, this one from the mission statement for “About Last Night”:
This is a blog about the arts in New York City and elsewhere...It’s about all the arts, not just one or two. Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that "in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one….the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves." We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people—maybe most—approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.
I think that sums up my thinking, and Our Girl’s, fairly well. And I bet Tyler doesn’t really disagree with us, either.
UPDATE: Scroll up from Tyler's original posting to see incoming responses from his other readers. See also Alex Ross:
I ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B. Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I've read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst's TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn't write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We're just filling the void….
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TT: The show aquatic
Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, whose off-Broadway revival I reviewed for The Wall Street Journal back in September, closed on Sunday. To mark the occasion, Twist invited me to come see the show again—only this time from backstage. I immediately took him up on the offer, bringing Our Girl with me to Dodger Stages to see the final performance. It was an unforgettable spectacle, especially for someone as stagestruck as I am. I did my fair share of acting in high school and college, but for me the real romance of the theater was to be found backstage, not in the spotlight, so I jumped at the priceless opportunity to watch Twist’s puppeteers from the far side of the curtain.
If you’ve never seen Symphonie Fantastique, my Wall Street Journal review gives a fairly clear idea of what it looks like out front:
Like “The Bald Soprano,” it’s a theatrical magic act that all but defies explanation, if not description. To put it as simply as possible, “Symphonie Fantastique” is an abstract, wordless puppet show performed in a 1,000-gallon tank of water and accompanied by a recording of Hector Berlioz’s “Fantastic Symphony.” That doesn’t tell you much, does it? If anything, so straightforward a description is likely to be offputting, especially to the casual theatergoer who doesn’t much care for puppets in the first place, so I’ll try to flesh things out a bit.
What you see in “Symphonie Fantastique” is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz’s own program for the “Fantastic Symphony,” Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz’s symphony is, more or less). The puppeteers are hidden from view by a black wall, and the tank, which looks rather like a flat-screen television, is lit so cunningly and colorfully that you soon become disoriented and surrender joyously to the illusions being created before your amazed eyes.
In the end, literal descriptions of what “happens” in “Symphonie Fantastique” must inevitably fall short of conveying its loony, inscrutable beauty. Metaphor is the only way to suggest its essence. I’ve now seen “Symphonie Fantastique” something like a half-dozen times, starting with its original off-off-Broadway production at the HERE Arts Center, and I described a previous incarnation as looking like “a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones.” If that sounds good to you, head for Dodger Stages and prepare to be entranced.
Seen from the other side of the wall, Twist's inscrutable illusions looked and sounded more like a fistfight in a dark alley on a rainy night. Soggy puppets and props sailed drippingly through the air, the black-clad puppeteers grunted and cursed and howled along with Berlioz, and I sat quietly in a corner with my mouth hanging open, alternately thinking Oh, that’s how they do it!, I have the coolest job in the whole world, and Maybe I should have brought a raincoat (a towel was supplied, fortunately). Every once in a while I'd snatch a hasty glance at a TV monitor that showed what it looked like from the front of the house. What I saw there was beautiful, but what I saw with my unaided eyes seemed chaotic to the point of insanity, and I kept reminding myself that it wasn’t—that the deceptively wild tumult was in fact choreographed down to the last splash.
Here’s another thought that crossed my mind as I sat in the wings: might it be that live theater in all its endless varieties is the most unselfish of the art forms? When I played bass in my college orchestra, for instance, I participated completely in the musical experience as it was happening. I could hear the piece unfolding, and reveled in the multihued sound of the ensemble of which I was a part. But the gifted artisans who enacted Symphonie Fantastique at Dodger Stages saw nothing but a huge tank of water into which they stuck odd-shaped objects and sloshed them around. The visual experience thereby brought into being was reserved exclusively for the audience. The performers had to take it on faith.
Watching Twist's puppeteers splash and curse and sing, I was reminded of George Balanchine’s famous remark that dancers, like angels, carry a message but do not themselves experience it. Of course they must experience something pleasurable—otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it day after day—but they don’t get to see what we see, not even when they see themselves after the fact on film or videotape. The same goes for puppeteers, and for actors of all kinds. Theirs is the burden, ours the blessing.
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TT: Elsewhere
• Bookish Gardener has made what at first glance appears to be a very significant music-related discovery about Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Click on the link and see for yourself.
• Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, digests the findings of the important new Pew Internet and American Life study:
27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers…. At the same time, for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog” means.
His comment:
Hell, at this stage in the birth of the web, I'll bet just as many people didn't know what the hell HTML was. The fact that almost 40 percent of online Americans know what blogs are is amazing.
I agree. Read the rest. This is no fad.
• The adorable Maccers spent Christmas in an ashram:
The temperature will go below freezing tonight and the electric heater that I have in the cabin doesn’t seem to be taking the edge off the chill. There are three electric bars which are trying to fight the icy winds coming through the two inch gaps under the door and around the windows. Two other things which have been filling me with a sense of foreboding are the large baskets filled with tambourines (tambourines!) I spied in the meditation hall and the hand holding Hare Krishna chanting we have to do before dinner. All of us in the kitchen. Singing over the vegetable curry. If I have to do that again, I very well might be fasting during my entire stay….
Eeuuww.
• Champion mystery writer Laura Lippman has trenchant things to say about her chosen line of work:
Crime fiction has its share of jerry-built and dilapidated stock, but the genre is sturdy, its possibilities endless. Come on in, but don't think you'll transform it via the literary equivalents of granite counter-tops and Viking stoves. Like the rowhouses of Baltimore, thrown up in the 19th century to house the working class, the only thing great crime fiction has transcended is those who would render it transitory….
Take that, Edmund Wilson!
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TT: Almanac
"Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity; i.e., the feeling aroused in the spectator is ‘What a pity it had to be this way’; Christian tragedy is the tragedy of possibility, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.’"
W.H. Auden, “The Christian Tragic Hero” (courtesy of Peter Robinson)
| Tuesday, January 4, 2005
TT: Mailbox
Our readers write:
• “You are doubtlessly correct that the word posses will fail to catch up with the word ‘blog.’ Not soon will its scrawny neck get stretched. But admit that a word so preeminently without felicity or grace, if it does not deserve to die, must not expect to be loved. The considerable onomatopoetic value of the word has been tragically wasted: blog is tuned to affliction, deep pain, infliction, galloping infection, whatever it was that Grendel's mother had in mind for Beowulf. It is a fork with a definite pitch that has gotten into the wrong bag. ‘New York bloggers have been blogging without surcease over the Met's production of Mozart's Magic Flute.’ Impossible, no? It will be a hundred years before this lump of coal becomes an 8-ball.”
• “Your quote from E.B. White
reminded me of the ending to Edward Hirsch's essay, 'Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,' in A William Maxwell Portrait (one of the books I requested and received for Christmas):
‘I can't reconcile myself to the fact that he is gone. The night before he passed away I stood on the sidewalk outside his apartment building and burst into tears. I was grieving in advance. I couldn't bear to be without him. I still can't. William Maxwell knew something about inconsolable grief. People hurried by on either side of me, but no one even glanced my way. It started to rain. The night opened its arms. New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.’”
• “Best wishes for ’05. I’m a big fan—although what you've cost me in CDs and books does not bear contemplation.”
Hey, it’s a nice problem to have….
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TT: Things to come (and go)
• It’s “Critics Week” at WNYC’s Soundcheck, and I’ll be taking my turn at the microphone this Friday. Here’s what the show’s Web site says about my upcoming appearance:
Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and music critic of Commentary, offers his favorites of 2004 from across the cultural spectrum. The week rounds out by allowing listeners to weigh in on their picks of the year.
Soundcheck airs in New York weekdays at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about this week’s episodes (mine included), or to listen online via streaming audio, go here.
• “The Art of Romare Bearden” closes this Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I’m ashamed to confess that I haven’t been to see it yet. I know, I know, I’ve been busy as hell, but Bearden is one of my favorite American artists, so I’m going to do my very best to get there this week. If you’re in the same boat, go here for more information.
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TT: Housekeeping
With Our Girl gone, I’ve been consoling myself by working on the right-hand column. In addition to updating the “Teachout in Commentary” and “Second City” modules with fresh links, I also undertook a major revision of “Sites to See,” the “About Last Night” blogroll. I’ve added a bunch of new blogs, as well as replacing a few old ones that either got knocked off inadvertently or were temporarily inactive, and I’ve also reorganized some of the categories under which the blogs are listed. We’ll be doing some compensatory pruning in the next few days, and you can also expect some new Top Fives shortly. (For those who wrote to tell me that the link to my new Commentary essay on Haydn was broken, it's fixed now.)
Here are the “Sites to See” categories, from top to bottom:
• ART LINKS: Web sites (including artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”’s invaluable host) that provide regularly updated links to English-language news stories and commentary about the arts.
• ART BLOGS: Blogs that are primarily (but not always exclusively) about the arts. We don’t break them out into different art forms—i.e., books, music, whatever—because we want to encourage interdisciplinary surfing.
• MEDIA/GOSSIP: Blogs and Web sites about the media and/or gossip (duh).
• PUBLICATIONS: Mainstream media Web sites, usually with substantial art-related content. (Whenever possible, we link directly to the arts pages of these sites.)
• RADIO: Art-related sites devoted to specific radio shows or hosted by radio stations. (This one’s new.)
• ARTIST SITES: Non-blog sites with frequently updated content maintained by artists and performers who interest us. (This is new, too.)
• CRITIC SITES: Ditto, only for critics.
• USEFUL SITES: Mostly reference-type sites about the arts and related subjects, plus a couple of on-line stores we like.
• OTHER BLOGS: Interesting blogs and bloggish sites that are not primarily arts-oriented.
Our Girl and I encourage you to comment on “Sites to See.” Bear in mind, though, that we’re mainly interested in hearing about artblogs and art-related sites that we haven’t yet discovered, or gotten around to blogrolling. We’re especially eager to build up “Radio Sites” as quickly as possible, and we also want to blogroll all the best arts pages of America’s regional newspapers.
If you have a new or underappreciated artblog that you think our readers might find interesting, feel free to send us your URL. Please don’t ask us to exchange links, though—we don’t do that. If your blog looks interesting to us, we’ll keep an eye on it, and if it remains both interesting and active, we’ll add it to “Sites to See.”
Now, go visit a blog you’ve never read before.
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TT: Almanac
"I don't want to own anything that won't fit in my coffin."
Fred Allen (quoted in John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
| Monday, January 3, 2005
TT: Entries from an unkept diary
• I once had a significant other who could easily have stepped out of a Nancy Mitford novel, or a children’s book. Among other things, it was her custom to anthropomorphize everything she ran across. Animals, books, housewares, pieces of furniture: all were endowed with personalities in her high-flying mind. I’d never done that kind of thing myself, my natural sense of fantasy being deficient to the point of nonexistence (I must have been a painfully literal child). Close proximity to so fantastic a person eventually gave me an appreciation for her flights of fancy, though, and to this day I occasionally catch myself thinking in something of the same way. As I walked home this morning from the bagel store, I noticed that the sidewalks were lined with discarded Christmas trees, and I thought: Oh, poor things! Were they well lit and handsomely trimmed? Did they look down on great piles of beautifully wrapped presents? Are they cold and lonely now? Or do they feel fulfilled?
• At breakfast with Our Girl the other day, my memory abruptly disgorged a long-lost fact: Arthur Rubinstein, the classical pianist, reread all of Proust, including George Painter’s two-volume biography, in the year before he went blind. I can’t recall whether he knew for sure that his sight was going or merely had a premonition of trouble ahead, but I do know he later declared himself to have been deeply satisfied by the way he’d spent his last sighted months.
I wonder what I’d do in like circumstances. I don't think I'd go out of my way to read anything at all, though I can see why someone else might want to do so, reading with the eyes being an experience utterly different from “reading” with the ears. (I’ve never listened to an entire book from cover to cover—I get too impatient.) But if not A la recherche du temps perdu, then what? I suppose the obvious thing would be to hit the museums one more time. On the other hand, I could imagine finding that too painful, knowing that I'd soon be deprived of such experiences together. And if I did it anyway, would I try to see as many masterpieces as possible, or concentrate on a few special favorites in the hopes of retaining them in my mind for a little while longer?
I suppose a philosopher might choose instead to continue his normal life, endeavoring to savor each day’s ordinary experiences to the fullest. Alas, I’m not a philosopher, merely a greedy aesthete who’d take a Balanchine ballet over a Balanchine-blue sky any day of the week. Does that mean I live my life once removed from the “real” world? Or are the aesthetic experiences of which the life of art is constituted as “real” as blue skies and fiery orange sunsets?
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TT: Rear-view mirror
Our Girl is now on her way back to Chicago, where she'll post in the next day or two about our weekend adventures. Watch this space for all the sordid details.
As for me, all I can say is that the gaiety of nations has been severely diminished....
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TT: Lots and lots of elsewhere
I’ve been bookmarking toothsome links for weeks, but only just found sufficient time to knock them together into a posting. Some turned out to have a short shelf life, but these are all fresh:
• My Wall Street Journal colleague Eric Gibson nailed it last week:
If Americans are generous, they are also vain. That's the sad conclusion to be drawn from the fact almost every new concert hall, museum, hospital wing and university building bears at least one donor's name. The "naming opportunity," as it is called, is the instrument of choice for development officers—their tried-and-true method of coaxing money from wealthy people. The strategy has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for worthy causes. But with its bald pandering, it has also corrupted the true spirit of philanthropy….
According to Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, anonymous philanthropy accounts for only about 1% of total annual giving—a drop in the bucket. The number might be larger, but anonymous philanthropy, by its nature, doesn't receive much publicity. There are no published surveys that might give it visibility and present it as an attractive option. Business Week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy and Slate all overlook it. "The fund-raising community dislikes it," says Mr. Lenkowsky. "Named donors are like seals of approval and are thought to generate more funds."
It is long past time for someone to publish an annual list of the country's largest anonymous donations. The idea would be not to recognize individuals, as other lists do—an impossible task anyway—but to celebrate the spirit in which such gifts were made and, by encouraging more of them, to help American philanthropy recover its honor. Perhaps such a list could, over time, make anonymous giving so fashionable as to eliminate "named giving" altogether, or at least reduce its greedy prominence….
• Household Opera on being a city person:
I'm troubled by the mindset that everyone has to do their own thing, have their own vehicle, own their own house, go their own way, pull their own weight, not lean on other people, not reach out, not connect, not be reminded of the millions of other lives going on in the world (and if you don't, you're a freak, or a naive Pollyanna who'll just get mugged or knifed). It's the same thing that bothers me when I read about how people in this country are getting less and less involved with social groups outside their families, bowling by themselves, not going to the movies when they can sit in their living rooms and enjoy "home theater," and retreating more and more into the private sphere….
Me, too.
• I am soooo into twang twang twang, the British harpist-blogger (you can move to Manhattan any time now, Helen!). Here’s another example of why:
Is it possible to be a perfect artist? To deal plainly, there is always more to do. That is the performer's Catch-22, striving for something we can only manage in patches, if at all. As Eliot remarks in The Dry Salvages, "For most of us this is the aim/Never here to be realised./Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying." But that is why it is moving to see a performance. It is heroic—it carries on regardless of difficulty, and it aspires to something that, because it does not come easily, is rare and precious. When somebody performs astoundingly well, they defy their human limitations and deliver something rich and strange….
• I recently stumbled across a now-mislaid link to a site that included a long list of “break-up lines of the philosophers.” Way geeky, but also way cool. Excerpts:
The Solipsist: It’s not you, it’s me.
The Rationalist, v. 3.0: If you can’t see your faults, there’s nothing more I can say.
The Atheist: These things just happen.
The Kantian: You lied to me!
The Hegelian: Do we have to go through this again?
• Another cool list, this one of “the things I will not do when I direct a Shakespeare production on stage or film” (and no, I can’t remember where I found this link, either). Highlights:
1. The ghost of Hamlet's father will not be played by the entire ensemble underneath a giant piece of diaphanous black material….
4. I will not imply that Hamlet is sleeping with his mother, or wants to….
12. I will not cast actresses as Helena and Hermia who are the same height.
13. Richard II's minions will not be made to wear pink….
25. I will not use long red ribbons to represent blood, particularly if the long red ribbons bear an unnerving resemblance to pasta.
To the unknown author of this list: a grateful drama critic salutes you!
• Alex Ross (whom OGIC and I ran into at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday) posts on a bloodcurdling phenomenon:
Just now I found myself typing the sentence, "La Mer, of course, depicts the sea." Has anyone else had the experience of more or less forgetting how to write—not to mention forgetting how to talk or think—toward the end of a book-writing process? The other troubling sensation I have is that the more verbiage I produce, the farther I am from being done.
You don’t know the half of it, buddy. Just wait till you spend ten years working on a book….
• Alicublog, my favorite Blue American grouch, has also been known to write on matters apolitical. Somebody sent me a link to a mini-essay he posted last year on Glen Campbell's recording of a pop song I love, Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman”:
That Jimmy Webb song is basically a dramatic fragment: a lineman in a barren stretch of the Great Plains during wintertime talks about the burdens of his business and the burdens of his love in alternating passages, but with a similar attitude: it's hard work, and things might go wrong at any time. It's pretty sophisticated for mainstream 60s pop, but it's the arrangement on this record that lifts it into glory. The orchestral sweeps and twang guitar are perfectly normal—a little C&W, a little Living Strings—but because the song is so weird, they actually promote rather than assuage a feeling of unease, like a haggard-looking guy at the end of a bar methodically peeling the labels off each of his beers. The main riff supports the feeling: the telegraphic guitar part, thin and insistent, cushioned in distant, ethereal strings….
Nice, really nice, except that I think maybe he underestimates the quality of the song itself, perhaps just a little. Listen to this recording and see if you don’t agree.
UPDATE: A reader just wrote to remind me of the original link that led me to this posting. Thanks for helping me give credit where it’s due....
• My Balanchine book
inspired the anonymous author of Searchblog to post something that touched me:
Apparently, it is ballet that will provide my ultimate salvation. It has come to my rescue on three significant occasions: during my childhood, at the outset of my major depression a year ago, and more recently when I plunged into a similar depressive episode. On each occasion, it was the exquisite beauty of ballet that redeemed me.
There is nothing in my childhood that would portend my intense love of dance, especially classical ballet. I grew up in a hardscrabble industrial town, several of my grandparents were immigrants, and “the arts” was something that strange men in capes and berets did with each other....
Don't I know it.
• On the other side of the coin, here’s a retired dancer who reminisces wryly about the mixed blessing of appearing in Balanchine’s Nutcracker, year in and year out:
My first adult role was Grandmother in the Party Scene of the first act. The Gr
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