About Last Night

TT: Home, at last

2009-11-20T05:00:30Z

This has been a wonderful week for New York-area theater, so busy that it took two columns in The Wall Street Journal for me to get it all in. Today I review two openings, the New York premieres of the first installment of Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle and Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room or the vibrator play. The first is a masterpiece, the second a piece of...well, something else altogether. Here's an excerpt. * * * Horton Foote, who died in March at the age of 92, had to wait until the very end of his life to win general recognition as one of America's greatest playwrights. The tide was turned by a sterling pair of Off-Broadway revivals, the Signature Theatre Company's 2005 production of "The Trip to Bountiful" and Primary Stages' 2007 production of "Dividing the Estate," that opened the eyes of a new generation of theatergoers to Foote's low-keyed mastery. When "Dividing the Estate" transferred to Broadway the following year, he scored his first commercial success on the New York stage--just in time for him to revel in it. Would that Foote could have lived to attend the New York opening of the first part of "The Orphans' Home Cycle," co-produced by Signature and Connecticut's Hartford Stage, where all three installments were seen earlier this year. It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren that you saw. Created by Foote at the suggestion of Michael Wilson, the artistic director of Hartford Stage and the director of this production, "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is a triptych carved out of a cycle of nine plays originally written between 1974 and 1997. It's the story of a quarter-century in the life of a Texas family, and the family is Foote's own, a flock of displaced people who are uprooted, scattered and damaged by the coming of modernity. The title alludes to Marianne Moore's poem "In Distrust of Merits": The world's an orphans' home. Shall/we never have peace without sorrow? At the center of the saga is Horace Robedaux, a fictionalized version of Foote's real-life father (beautifully played as a child by Dylan Riley Snyder, as a teenager by Henry Hodges and as an adult by Bill Heck). Cast adrift by the death of his own alcoholic father and the remarriage of his mother to a resentful man who loathes his stepson, Horace becomes a stranger in a familiar land, searching for a peace that continually eludes him.... Not having seen the second or third parts, I can't yet evaluate the total effect of the cycle as a whole, but "The Story of a Childhood" has the narrative sweep that you look for in major novels, coupled with the electric immediacy that only live theater can supply.... Sarah Ruhl writes retchingly coy plays that pretend to be transgressive--a sure-fire recipe for success of a sort. "In the Next Room or the vibrator play" (trendy capitalization and punctuation by Ms. Ruhl, not me) is an all-too-typical example of her method. It's a fictionalized history play about a 19th-century American physician (Michael Cerveris) who discovers that "hysterical" women experience miraculous recoveries when he induces "paroxysms" by stimulating their nether regions with his brand-new invention, an electric vibrator.... "In the Next Room" is a sentimental wallow studded with sniggering jokes that too often appear to be made at the expense of Ms. Ruhl's innocent characters, none of whom is believably Victorian in speech or carriage. The result is the theatrical equivalent of a jelly donut with vinegar-flavored frosting... * * * Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

2009-11-20T05:00:01Z

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa (quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Jan. 18, 1978)

TT: Little girl, you've had a busy day

2009-11-19T05:00:45Z

I saw five shows this week, all of them important, so The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to give me a bonus column in today's paper so that I could write at greater length than usual. Today I report on the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's My Wonderful Day, a New Jersey revival of On the Town, and the first Broadway revival of Ragtime. All are good, the first two extraordinarily so. Here's an excerpt. * * * Is America finally catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, England's most popular playwright? I sure hope so. The success of the Broadway revival of "The Norman Conquests" raised Mr. Ayckbourn's profile by several notches in this country, and the Off-Broadway production of his latest play, "My Wonderful Day," is bound to benefit from that development--as well it should. Not only is "My Wonderful Day" one of the wittiest and most pristinely crafted of Mr. Ayckbourn's dark farces, but the Brits Off Broadway festival has wisely imported his own production, which was first seen in October at Mr. Ayckbourn's home base, Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre. Like the play, it's a gem, a textbook example of how to stage a comedy effectively, and anyone fortunate enough to see it will wonder why Mr. Ayckbourn's parallel career as a director is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic. "My Wonderful Day" starts off quietly: Laverne (Petra Letang), a cleaning woman, brings Winnie (Ayesha Antoine), her nine-year-old daughter, to the house of one of her clients, a middle-aged TV pitchman named Kevin (Terence Booth) whose wife (Alexandra Mathie) has just discovered that he's sleeping with his young secretary (Ruth Gibson). As Winnie looks on in silent amazement--and amusement--things go from bad to worse to absolutely appalling. Yet Mr. Ayckbourn, as is his wont, takes care to make Kevin not just a comic beanbag but an unfeeling brute, thereby turning what in less skilled hands might have been no more than an amusing romp into a poignant, sharp-eyed portrait of a marriage gone sour.... "On the Town," the 1944 sailor-suit musical that made Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green somewhat rich and very famous, is a masterpiece that has never gotten the respect it deserves. The original Broadway production was a hit, but the 1971 and 1998 revivals both flopped, and the 1949 film version, whose benighted makers scrapped most of Bernstein's songs and all of Robbins' dances, was a travesty. Now, though, New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse has given us a production of "On the Town" staged by Bill Berry that gets everything right, all the way down to the last detail, and the results are lovely and amazing to behold.... Paper Mill's "On the Town" is better than any musical now playing on Broadway, "South Pacific" included. It belongs there.... If you saw Stafford Arima's excellent staging of "Ragtime" at Paper Mill four years ago, you won't be greatly surprised by the new Broadway revival of the musical version of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel about life in turn-of-the-century America. Marcia Milgrom Dodge's production, which originated last season at Washington's Kennedy Center, is a slimmed-down, pageant-style rendering of "Ragtime" played on an open stage surrounded by cast-iron catwalks. I don't know whether Ms. Dodge saw the Paper Mill revival, but she was clearly thinking along similar lines, and the results are just as effective, maybe even more so.... * * * Read the whole thing here.

TT: So you want to see a show?

2009-11-19T05:00:30Z

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• 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)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Nov. 29, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

2009-11-19T05:00:01Z

"It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make due with what you get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want." W. Somerset Maugham, "The Treasure"

TT: Such language, son!

2009-11-18T05:00:45Z

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I taped two excerpts from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the "Writers Reading" section of Vanity Fair's Web site. That reading is now available as a podcast, and you can listen to it by going here. Yes, Mom, your beloved Satchmo was known to talk dirty from time to time, and I quote him verbatim in these excerpts. So if you don't want to hear me talk dirty, don't listen.

TT: Snapshot

2009-11-18T05:00:30Z

Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin's Vers la flamme, Op. 72, at his New York apartment: (This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

2009-11-18T05:00:01Z

"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best." W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker

TT: Never too late

2009-11-17T05:00:30Z

Mrs. T and I finally got around to watching Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise for the first time the other day. You may wonder why two devoted film lovers waited so long to see a film universally regarded as one of the supreme achievements of European cinema. Alas, I don't have a good answer other than "Sir, you MAY wonder," but at least I can echo the words of Evelyn Waugh, who made the following entry in his diary in 1946:

What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of Portrait of a Lady.

Waugh was only forty-two when he wrote those lines. At fifty-three, my reaction to seeing Children of Paradise is to say, What joy to have more masterpieces ahead of me! * * * The English-language theatrical trailer for Children of Paradise:

TT: Almanac

2009-11-17T05:00:01Z

"Dreams, life, they're the same thing. Otherwise life's not worth living." Jacques Prévert, screenplay for Children of Paradise

TT: After the fact

2009-11-16T05:00:30Z

On Saturday I saw five copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Second Street and Broadway in Manhattan. It was the first time that I'd seen Pops in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A little later in the day I heard from my friend Ariel Davis, who saw Pops in a store on the Upper East Side, snapped a picture of the display, and e-mailed it to me. I published my first book in 1989, and I've been around the track several more times since then, so I can't honestly say that it thrilled me to the marrow to see yet another book of mine on sale. What pleased me most was the excitement of Ariel, who moved from Alabama to New York a couple of years ago and subsequently worked as one of my research assistants on Pops. "I'm beside myself seeing my name in print!" she tweeted. While anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm the least blasé of people, I suppose it's inevitable that such experiences should sooner or later cease to be exciting to the professional writer. Dostoevsky said it: "Man gets used to everything--the beast!" It's been a long time since I got a charge out of seeing my name in print. Even so, I have yet to reach the level of detachment attained by Paul Hindemith when he decided that he was too busy to attend the world premiere of his Symphonia Serena in Dallas in 1947. "Why should I go to hear my own works?" he said to a friend. Geoffrey Skelton, Hindemith's biographer, tells the rest of the story:

In the end he did consent to go, though only because he had a certain musical problem on his mind and thought that he could best work it out in the train, where he would be undisturbed. Carl Miller, who gave me the clearest account of this episode which is one of the favourite and most widely recalled ones at Yale, said that his students were amazed when he came into the classroom, grinning from ear to ear. "Why aren't you in Dallas?" they asked. "Because I had solved my problem by the time I got to New York," he said. "So I got out of the train and came back home."

I admire Hindemith's sangfroid--sort of--but I don't share it. To be sure, I'm pretty damn busy myself these days. Not only am I seeing shows most nights between now and the time when I hit the road for the first leg of my book tour, but I'm in the process of deciding on the subject of my next book, and Paul Moravec and I are also talking over various possibilities for our second opera. Yet it never occurred to me for a moment not to stop by Barnes & Noble on Friday, and when my friend told me how excited she was to see Pops on sale in her neighborhood bookstore, I thought at once of the morning in 1977 when my very first piece of professional writing, a concert review, was published by the Kansas City Star. I got up early that day, drove to the nearest honor box, popped in a quarter, pulled out a copy of the Star, and turned as quickly as I could to the page where my six-inch review was printed. The eighteen-year-old H.L. Mencken did the same thing on February 24, 1899, the morning after he filed his first two stories for the Baltimore Herald. "I was up with the milkman the next morning to search the paper," he recalled in Newspaper Days, "and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as a barrel of brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched." I remember, Ariel. Oh, how I remember.

TT: Almanac

2009-11-16T05:00:01Z

"In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: 'Incipit Vita Nova: Here begins the new life.'" Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova (trans. A.S. Kline)

YOU NEVER SAW ART TATUM SWEAT

2009-11-15T19:09:39Z

"What was it about Tatum that kept him in relative obscurity? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his personality was almost entirely opaque. We're told that he liked baseball and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer by the quart, but little else is known for sure about his private life..."

TT: Still crazy after all these millennia

2009-11-13T05:00:30Z

Two thumbs-up reviews in today's Wall Street Journal: I raved about Goodspeed Musicals' revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the off-Broadway transfer of Avenue Q. Here's an excerpt. * * * Some musicals are funnier than others, but few of the most memorable ones rise or fall on the strength of their jokes. "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," which opened on Broadway in 1962 and has been playing somewhere or other ever since, is an exception. It's the funniest musical ever written, give or take...well, nothing. The book, by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, could be performed without the songs and still work--and the songs are by Stephen Sondheim! To see "A Funny Thing," even in a fair-to-middling production, is to be enraptured, and Goodspeed Musicals' revival, directed and choreographed with whirlwind flair by Ted Pappas, leaves nothing at all to be desired in the make-'em-laugh department.... Except for "Comedy Tonight," Mr Sondheim's songs are rarely heard outside the context of the show, and most critics, myself previously included, typically fail to appreciate the contribution that they make to the total effect of "A Funny Thing." This time, though, I got it: Mr. Sondheim's neatly turned rhymes and clean, crisp harmonies, especially in "Free," play cleverly against the plot, adding a pinch of sweetness that sharpens the savor of the knockabout humor.... If you didn't catch it the first time around, "Avenue Q" is a parody of "Sesame Street" whose characters, a gaggle of underexperienced, overeducated college grads, move to New York City in search of fame, fortune and entry-level jobs, none of which they find. The show remains both fresh and timely--I know plenty of twentysomethings who are having at least as much trouble getting work as did their older brothers and sisters--and its digs at political correctness are, if anything, even more pointed today. Most of the "stars" of "Avenue Q" are head-and-torso puppets that are manipulated by the performers in full view of the audience. Anika Larsen, who was playing Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut when "Avenue Q" ended its Broadway run, has made the transfer to New World Stages as well, and she proves to be equally adept as a puppeteer and as a singing actor... * * * Read the whole thing here.

TT: You never saw him sweat

2009-11-13T05:00:15Z

Like most columnists, I try to keep up with anniversaries, but the centennial of Art Tatum's birth--October 13--slipped past me. No wonder, since scarcely anyone seems to have taken note of it, whether in print or on stage. Yet Tatum, who died in 1956, is still the most admired pianist in the history of jazz, and it seems likely that he will hang onto that status for decades, even centuries, to come. On the other hand, he isn't especially well known to the general public, at least not by comparison with Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Why isn't Tatum a household name? Is it because jazz itself is no longer as popular as it used to be? Or might there be something about his elaborately virtuosic style that has kept him out of the public eye? I'll be exploring this question in my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal. If you're curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say. * * * UPDATE: Read the whole thing here. Art Tatum plays his jazz interpretation of Dvorak's "Humoresque" on The Faye Emerson Show in 1950: