Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, extended through June 17, reviewed here)
• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 26, reviewed here)
• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Look Back in Anger (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 8, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:
• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, remounting of Broadway production, adult subject matter, original run reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA MONICA:
• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, suitable for mature children, original run reviewed here)]]>
If you're a theater buff with a serious interest in American comedy, "Once in a Lifetime" probably ranks high on the list of little-known shows you'd love to see onstage. Otherwise, I doubt you've heard of it. A farce about the coming of talking pictures to Hollywood, "Once in a Lifetime" was the first collaboration between George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who went on to write "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "You Can't Take It With You." It opened on Broadway in 1930 and ran for 406 performances, which was big business back then. Two years later, it was turned into a middling movie, then vanished from sight (the 1979 Broadway revival was a flop). Today the play is known solely because Mr. Hart wrote about how it came to Broadway in "Act One," his 1959 autobiography.
Why doesn't anybody do "Once in a Lifetime" nowadays? It costs too much--way too much. The published script calls for five sets and 38 actors. You could get away with that in the Thirties, but no commercial producer would think of bringing so horrendously expensive a play to Broadway anymore. Enter San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater and Sarasota's Asolo Repertory Theatre, two regional companies that double as drama schools, making it possible for them to put on large-cast shows by using students to cover smaller parts. A.C.T. mounted "Once in a Lifetime" last fall and Asolo Rep is doing it now, and both versions, not coincidentally, were directed by the same man, Mark Rucker.
Since the two productions are identical in concept--most of the members of the cast play double, triple and quadruple roles--I tossed a coin and elected to see "Once in a Lifetime" at Asolo Rep, whose version makes use of 19 actors, four more than at A.C.T. It was worth the trip. "Once in a Lifetime" proves to be as fresh as any of the later screwball comedies on whose screenplays it surely left a mark (not to mention "Singin' in the Rain," whose authors, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, must have had it in mind).
"Once in a Lifetime" is the story of George, Jerry and May (Jason Bradley, Andrew Carter and Hillary Clemens), a trio of small-time vaudeville hoofers who see the premiere of "The Jazz Singer" in New York and decide to go to Hollywood, pass themselves off as authorities on elocution and make their fortune by teaching silent-movie actors how to talk....
This premise is so familiar that you have to remind yourself that Kaufman and Hart were the first writers ever to turn it into a plot. Part of what makes "Once in a Lifetime" more than just a historical curiosity is the jaundiced wit with which the characters comment on the head-banging craziness that surrounds them. (Jerry, working a crossword puzzle: "What's a four-letter word for actor?" May: "Dope.") But mere wisecracks won't make a play fly. That's where craftsmanship comes in, and the authors of "Once in a Lifetime" knew their stuff. Every piece of the puzzle fits together with a crisp, satisfying click...
Ms. Clemens, who gave a poignant performance as the tomboy in Writers' Theatre's 2008 Chicago revival of "Picnic," plays May as a spunky, cloche-hatted girl-next-door who knows how to snap off a punch line, which is just right....
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Read the whole thing here.
The 1932 film adaptation of Once in a Lifetime:
Aline MacMahon, who plays May, created the role in the original Brighton Beach tryout of the stage version, but was replaced on Broadway by Jean Dixon. She later appeared in the play's Los Angeles premiere.]]>
• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
• James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• John P. Marquand, Point of No Return
• William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
• Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness
• Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
UPDATE: Patrick Kurp responds, thoughtfully as always. Some of his picks, not surprisingly, came within inches of making my list.
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Samuel Beckett said it: "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on." To drive past an orange grove while listening to the Adagio assai of the Concerto in G is to be awakened, if only for a moment or two, to the beauty at the heart of things, to be fully alive for as long as we have it in us. Sooner or later habit will always lull us back into the terrible sleep of everyday life--but then a great work of art sounds reveille, and we sit bolt upright, see treasure, and weep.
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Martha Argerich plays the slow movement of Maurice Ravel's Concerto in G:
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It isn't quite right to say that I feel the need for a change, since the past few years have been so full of changes. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I'm trying to decide how I want to spend the next part (which may, of course, be the last part) of my life. What shall I do once Satchmo at the Waldorf opens in Lenox and the manuscript of Mood Indigo is shipped off to Gotham Books? Should I embark on yet another biography? Ought I to continue working as a critic? Might I want to try my hand at teaching? Is my first venture into playwriting destined to be a one-shot affair? Above all, I long to know the answer to this question: are my energies best spent as a jack-of-all-trades, or has the time come at last for me to direct my fire at a single target?
The longer I live, the surer I am that the world was made for specialists, and I've always been reluctant to settle into a pigeonhole, however commodious. When I played music, I played many kinds of music on more than one instrument. When I became a critic, I wrote about whatever interested me rather than concentrating on a single medium. When I became a biographer, I jumped from subject to subject (first a journalist, then a choreographer, then a jazzman). No sooner was my first opera libretto produced than I started writing my first play. Yes, it's been fun, but might I have been better served had I concentrated on one thing? While I don't think it's right to call me a dilettante--I've aspired to professional standards in everything to which I've set my hand--I sometimes wonder whether my reluctance to specialize has kept me from doing as well as I might have done in any of my varied lines of work.
Even at fifty-six, it's not quite too late for me to change my ways, or at least modify them. It's well within the realm of possibility that I have twenty-odd years of comparatively undiminished energy ahead of me, and I want to use those years in the best and most satisfying way that I can. Up to now I've operated on the assumption that life itself would tell me what to do next. Will it do so yet again? Or ought I to take courage in hand and place all my chips on a single number? And if so, should it be one of the numbers on which I've successfully bet in the past--or would I do better to try something really different?
Merely to write these words is to smile at their preposterous presumptuousness. I noted seven years ago that "nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I'm not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure." You'd think, then, that I'd know better than to suppose that I could ever point myself in any conceivable direction with a reasonable expectation of getting where I thought I wanted to go. Yet here I am, trying once again to figure out what my next move should be.
The truth is that my next few moves are already set in stone. I've got a book to finish and a play to see onto the stage, The Wall Street Journal still expects to hear from me six times a month, and Paul Moravec and I are just getting started on our third opera. Nor do I have any particularly bright ideas about what to do after that: I have yet to receive an offer of steady employment from a college or think tank, and no matter how well Satchmo at the Waldorf does this summer, I have no illusions about being able to make anything remotely approaching a living by writing plays, much less opera libretti.
In short, nothing has changed--yet. Maybe it won't, and maybe that'll be just fine. Or maybe not. Edward Steichen said it: "Every ten years or so, a man should give himself a good swift kick in the pants!" Am I due?]]>
Patricia Neal, who saw Taylor play Amanda Wingfield on Broadway, said in Broadway: The Golden Age that she gave "the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life." According to Harold Prince, "I knew when I watched it, and I sat in the balcony, you'll never see greater acting as long as you live." Given the fact that countless other theater professionals who saw Laurette Taylor's Amanda in the theater have said pretty much the same thing, I can't imagine another hitherto-unknown archival document that would be of more compelling interest to scholars and aficionados of American theater in the twentieth century than a sound recording of Taylor reading a fragment of The Glass Menagerie, however brief. Would that I were in a position to catch the next plane to Austin!
Alas, I'll be otherwise occupied for some time to come, so if anyone who sees this posting has in his possession an air check of the Laurette Taylor episode of We, the People, which aired on CBS from 1936 to 1951, would you please get in touch with me? I'm sure that I'll make it to Austin sooner or later, but later is more likely than sooner, and I'd prefer not to wait any longer than absolutely necessary in order to hear and report on this priceless memento of a great artist at the peak of her powers.]]>