Archives for October 1, 2004

By the time most of you read these words, I’ll be in Chicago, spending the next four days hanging out with Our Girl in Chicago and going to see four plays (I added one at the last minute) and an opera, about which more after I return. Wish me retrospective luck with the flight!

We might blog on Monday, or possibly even later tonight (don’t count on the latter, though). On the other hand, we might not. You never can tell. Either way, I’ll be back on Tuesday.

Incdientally, I’ve been updating the right-hand column while waiting for my car to arrive. Much more to come after I return to New York next Tuesday, but some new items are already in place.

Enjoy. And have a nice weekend. Our Girl and I definitely will.

P.S. No, I haven’t been reading my blogmail this week. I was too busy writing. But I’ll empty the bag as soon as I return to New York.

(Well, on second thought, maybe I’ll do it on Wednesday. But I will do it. I swear.)

(I bet that title got your attention!)

Time again for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. This week I went out to the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey to see Of Thee I Sing, and was thereby made happy:

“Of Thee I Sing” is about politics like “Animal House” is about higher education. Written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who also collaborated on the Marx Brothers’ “Animal Crackers,” it’s a light-hearted, light-minded satire of life in our nation’s capital back in the long-lost days when vice presidents were nobodies (“We put a lot of names in a hat, and this fellow lost”) and ordinary people had better things to do than parse stump speeches. The operetta-like score, by George and Ira Gershwin, pokes similarly gentle fun at the foibles of the elected class, and there’s even a class-A ballad, “Who Cares?,” to leaven the loaf.

“Of Thee I Sing” hasn’t been revived on Broadway since 1951 (in fact, this was the first time I’d ever seen a staged performance of the show), and I wondered whether it might be hopelessly dated. The answer is that it’s dated, but not even slightly hopeless. Though American politics has changed beyond recognition in the past 70 years, you’ll still be charmed by the goofy tale of John P. Wintergreen (Ron Bohmer), an amiable hack who is catapulted into the White House by promising that if elected, he’ll marry the winner of an Atlantic City beauty contest….

I wondered briefly whether director Tina Landau (“Floyd Collins”) might make the mistake of trying to wrench “Of Thee I Sing” into modern times. Again, be cool: Ms. Landau’s high-spirited staging, simply but ingeniously designed by Walt Spangler, is entirely faithful to the letter and spirit of the show….

The Oldest Profession, on the other hand, didn’t even come close to doing it for me:

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, it’s politics as usual at the Peter Norton Space, where the Signature Theatre Company has launched a season-long survey of the plays of Paula Vogel, who won her Pulitzer in 1998 for “How I Learned to Drive.” First up is “The Oldest Profession,” a naggingly obvious piece of sermonry about five superannuated Upper West Side prostitutes who run afoul of the Reagan Revolution. (The ladies, we’re told, got their start in Storyville, New Orleans’ legendary red-light district, which was shut down in 1917, meaning that they would all have had to be near-octogenarians in 1980, when the action of the play is set. That’s pretty old to still be hooking anything other than lap rugs.) Reduced to penury by the aging of their clientele and the heartlessness of supply-side economics, they die off one by one, each working girl serving up a feeble cabaret turn as she ascends to the Great Whorehouse in the Sky. Did I say blah blah blah?…

I also put in a plug for Rose Rage:

Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Rose Rage” is playing at the Duke on 42nd Street through Oct. 17. Edward Hall’s marathon adaptation of Shakespeare’s three “Henry VI” plays (five and a half hours, including a dinner break) is set in the locker room of a Victorian slaughterhouse, a spectacular visual metaphor for what can happen when politics degenerates into violence. I saw “Rose Rage” in the Windy City last January and found it thrilling, especially the shockingly malevolent performance of Jay Whittaker as Richard III. He’s at the Duke, together with the rest of the Chicago cast. Don’t be deceived by the running time–“Rose Rage” goes by like a shot.

No link. Do the usual, or the other thing.

On Thursday I took Sarah (who is soooo cool, as is her new Baltimore Sun mystery column) to see New York City Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’ Daphne, composed in 1938 but only just now receiving its New York stage premiere. Many of my critical colleagues have been unenthusiastic about Stephen Lawless’ direction and Ashley Martin-Davis’ set design, Alex Ross in particular, but I found both to be serviceable, if not what they should have been. I don’t think it’s excessively literal-minded, for example, to think that when you’re staging an opera that ends with a beautiful woman turning into a laurel tree, you ought to make some effort to suggest such a transformation! On the other hand, Elizabeth Futral was wonderful in the title role–she’s as good an actress as she is a singer, and I’ve never understood why she isn’t a full-fledged star–and George Manahan coaxed surprisingly impressive sounds out of New York City Opera’s inconsistent but well-intentioned pit orchestra.

I can see why Daphne has never found a secure place in the standard repertoire. The length is a bit on the awkward side (an hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission), the myth-based plot a bit on the befuddling side. But Strauss’s score is a beauty, the gateway to the welcome depouillement of his middle-period style that made possible the radiantly autumnal lyricism of Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs, and to see it enacted on stage, even in a problematic production, is the best way to get to know it.

Perhaps Daphne isn’t quite so awkward in length as it once seemed, at least for today’s clock-watching operagoers. The curtain went up at 7:30 and came down at 9:15, allowing plenty of time for a leisurely dinner after the show. (We had Indian food at Sapphire, which I also recommend.)
That’s short enough to make Daphne worth your while purely as a fling, and if you love late Strauss as much as I do, you obviously can’t afford to miss it.

Only one more performance, alas, this Sunday at 1:30. You know what to do.

(If you’ve never heard any of Richard Strauss’ later music, go here right now and order this CD. I promise you won’t be sorry.)

Lileks
held forth the other day on A.J. Liebling, one of my favorite writers:

I suppose I should blush for not reading him sooner, since he’s one of those names journalists throw around to prove that the scribbler’s craft can produce true artists. He wrote for the New Yorker in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and was one of those chroniclers of the demi-monde of gyms and bars. Or so the reputation has it. Well, I’ve been dipping through Just Enough Liebling,
and I don’t get it. I just don’t. Part of the problem is that he writes long detailed pieces about food, and food writing bores me. (Unless I am the one doing the writing.) The attention to gustatory detail can seem unseemly, after a while. All that talk of sauces and obscure drizzles and precious pates and brash herbs – please. It’s just dinner. There’s a difference between describing the charms of one’s first love and going on and on about the interesting pattern of moles on a hooker’s back….

Not so, not so! But I can see how he was led astray: Just Enough Liebling, the just-published anthology of Liebling’s essays, leaves out much of his best work and includes too much of the other kind. I filed a review for next week’s Weekly Standard a couple of days ago, so I don’t want to jump the gun on myself, but to Lileks and any other skeptics out there I say: wait until my piece comes out, then make up your minds.

I’ll post a link if there’s a free one. Otherwise, I’ll tell you what I said when the time comes. In the meantime, keep your Lugers holstered.

The Lascivious Biddies, whom I recently had occasion to describe as “New York’s hippest girl group” (watch this space for details), will be throwing a CD release party at Joe’s Pub on Saturday, October 9, at 9:30. I wrote the liner notes for their new album, Get Lucky (nice title, huh?), and here’s a tantalizing snippet thereof:

I like smart music, the kind that doesn’t tell you everything it knows the first time you hear it. I like uncategorizable music that can’t be squeezed into smug little pigeonholes. I like serious music that isn’t afraid to be funny–and vice versa. If that’s what you like, too, then you’ve come to the right band, and the right album. Or, to put it another way, you just got lucky.

Start with the witty sound of the Lascivious Biddies, a knowing blend of chirpy girl-group pop and the smooth swing of a King Cole-style jazz trio (piano, guitar, bass, no drums). Lee Ann Westover’s sly, edgy lead vocals ride atop a chiming cushion of close harmony, with Deidre Rodman and Amanda Monaco weaving piano and electric guitar together so deftly that you can’t always tease them apart, and Saskia Lane laying down shapely bass lines that tie each song together like a well-wrapped Christmas package. On paper, it’s a quirky, unexpected mixture, but when you first hear it for yourself, the results sound so utterly natural that you never stop to wonder why nobody ever tried it before.

The songs–most of them by the Biddies themselves, with a couple of shrewdly chosen covers thrown in for contrast–are as unobtrusively unpredictable as the way in which they’re performed. Some, like “Famous,” take a coolly detached look at the idiosyncrasies of New York life (“I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street”). Others offer wry reminders that many New Yorkers, including two of the Biddies, hail from points west, and know better than to write them off as flyover country: “I know a girl named Betty who wears patent-leather shoes/She just moved from Missouri and she’s feeling kinda bruised.” Ever and always, their collective point of view is that of four big-city women who take a tough-minded, sharply contemporary view of men: sometimes affectionate, sometimes dismissive, always disillusioned….

If any of that makes you curious, go hear them, and tell ’em I sent you.

To hear samples from Get Lucky, go here.

For more information about Joe’s Pub, go here.

“Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Nancy Mitford, March 31, 1951