Archives for September 2004

“There comes a day, in the ripe maturity of late summer, when you first detect a suggestion of the season to come; often as subtle as a play of evening light against familiar bricks, or the drift of a few brown leaves descending, it signals imminent release from savage heat and intemperate growth. You anticipate cool, misty days, and a slow, comely decadence in the order of the natural. Such a day now dawned; and my pale northern soul, in its pale northern breast, quietly exulted as the earth slowly turned its face from the sun.”

Patrick McGrath, “The Angel”

Madeleine Peyroux’s Careless Love, about which I wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, is now #3 (!) on amazon.com, at least as of the time stamped on this post.

You go, girl.

UPDATE: Now she’s at #2. You go, readers!

After a two-week vacation-related hiatus, the Friday drama column of The Wall Street Journal is open for business again this morning. I reviewed two shows, Slava’s Snowshow and an off-off-Broadway revival of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and liked them both:

Created by Slava Polunin, best known in the U.S. for his work with Cirque du Soleil, “Slava’s Snowshow” is a zany fantasia for five melancholy-looking Russian clowns, several squirt bottles full of water, a dozen or so king-sized balloons, enough fog to shut down an airport and enough confetti to welcome home an astronaut.

I’m acutely allergic to pretentious clownery, so when I read that Mr. Polunin was influenced by Fellini and describes his brand of theater as “counter-Beckett,” I reached for the nearest cream pie. Fortunately, nobody says anything out loud in “Slava’s Snowshow” (nothing intelligible, that is), and whatever Mr. Polunin thinks it all means, the results aren’t even slightly intellectual, though my guess is that American dancegoers will detect a certain resemblance to the quirky comedy of Pilobolus Dance Theatre, minus the dancing. To be sure, the self-contained vignettes that make up “Slava’s Snowshow” are not without their dark moments–especially the bit in which Mr. Bolunin lurches around the stage with a chestful of arrows

I went to Joe’s Pub on Thursday to hear the debut of what may ultimately evolve into something of a vocal supergroup. Voices Collective consists of Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Kate McGarry, Lauren Kinhan, and Luciana Souza, all of whom have formidable individual reputations (and one of whom has figured frequently and prominently on this blog right from the start).

“She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hand over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: ‘Guess who!'”

At least not until Friday, anyway. Yes, I know, I said on Tuesday that I was probably going to take Wednesday off, and look what happened! On the other hand, “About Last Night” racked up an exceptionally high number of page views yesterday–about 8,300, one of our best days ever–so I didn’t feel I could shut the shop down with a clear conscience.

I made a special guest appearance on the Leisure & Arts page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal to write about Madeleine Peyroux:

“Sorrow comes in great waves–no one can know that better than you–but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.”