Archives for November 2004

Specifically:

– Robert Gottlieb and I will be appearing next Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square (the address is 33 E. 17th St.) to discuss the life and work of George Balanchine with Robert Greskovic, the dance critic of The Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb, the dance critic of the New York Observer, is the author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. We’ll be signing copies of our books after the talk. (If you’ve already bought All in the Dances, bring it along and I’ll inscribe it with pleasure.)

The show starts at seven o’clock. For more information, go here.

– On Friday, Nov. 19, I’ll be coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to talk about Balanchine and his legacy with Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. The show starts at six o’clock, but if you come early, you can see “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum.” The galleries close at five p.m., time enough to go out to dinner, then come back and hear us talk.

For more information, go here.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (July 2, 1751)

I thought of a possible game you might like: What did you read when? It was prompted by a friend, who reported that his wife said their mid-teenage kids better read Ayn Rand quick, or they will be too old for her.

I was thinking of reading the Alexandria Quartet about a dozen years ago, in my early thirties, when my wife, who had loved it, waved me off: I was too old.

There are books that can only be read when we’re young; books that can only be read when we’re old; and books that can be read at all ages, but which change as their readers do. Maybe there are also books that are the same for everybody (genre fiction? Wodehouse?).

I’m on the fly all week and won’t have time to play the first round myself, but this is obviously a superior game, so I’ve decided to pass the word to any of you who feel like jumping into the pool. I’ll get back to it once things slow down and my lungs clear up (the second of which seems to be happening, about which more later).

For now, gotta run. Just got back from The Incredibles (also AWML) and now have to change clothes for an off-off-Broadway preview waaaaay downtown. More anon.

I strolled over to TKTS to
check things out. Everything, it seemed, was on half-price sale. If you
take a chance on previews, and if you want to see nearly everything else,
including THE PRODUCERS, it’s available for the reduced rate. And that
included much of off-Broadway.

My correspondent is a high-octane theater buff. In case you don’t know what we’re talking about, TKTS is the Theatre Development Fund’s Times Square kiosk that sells same-day discount tickets to Broadway and off-Broadway shows.

Go thou and do likewise.

The bad news is that I have two shows to see, plus a speech to give, between now and Monday morning. The good news is that I don’t have any urgent deadlines.

All things considered, I think I’ll hang it up until Monday. Have a nice weekend. (Sniffle.)

First is The Foreigner:

It says in the program that Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” originally produced in 1983 and revived this week by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is “one of America’s most popular plays.” That was news to me–I’d never heard of it–so I did a little nosing around and found out that “The Foreigner,” which survived tepid reviews to run for two years Off Broadway, has since become a staple item at regional and community theaters around the country. It figures. Like “Charley’s Aunt” and “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “The Foreigner” is a pleasant, undemanding farce built around an inherently silly situation, the kind of play that’s as actor-proof as a comedy can be. So long as they learn their lines and follow the stage directions, even a bunch of raw amateurs can put it on and expect to get laughs.

Why, then, is the Roundabout going to the trouble of reviving so provincial a show? Two words: Matthew Broderick. The erstwhile co-star of “The Producers” was born to play Charlie Baker, the mild-mannered, tightly wrapped Brit who pays a visit to a Georgia fishing lodge and is there induced (don’t ask how) to pose as a foreigner of unknown origin who can’t speak a word of English. Mr. Broderick gleefully hurls himself into the fray, tossing off meaningless mock-Slavic monologues (“Byottsky dottsky! Perch damasa baxa raxa”) and generally conducting himself like a lunatic on vacation from the asylum….

Next, Five by Tenn:

I was downright flabbergasted by “And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens,” the third part of “Five by Tenn,” the Manhattan Theatre Club’s too-cutely-named quintuple bill of previously unknown one-act plays that opened last night at City Center’s Stage II. Unlike the other plays on the program, this 1959 vignette about a flouncy New Orleans drag queen (Cameron Folmar) and the tough-guy sailor he picks up in a bar (Myk Watford) is concise, realistic, free of pseudo-poetry and wholly involving. Why does it work so well? Could it be because Williams, in a radical departure from his usual practice, chose for the first and only time to write a play whose characters and subject matter are explicitly gay? (That’s what the press release claims, anyway.) Whatever the reason, the results are memorable….

Finally, I went back to Wonderful Town after a year’s absence to see a familiar new face:

Brooke Shields, the latest celebrity non-singer to join the cast of a Broadway musical, has replaced Donna Murphy in “Wonderful Town.” I can’t think of a scarier act to follow: Ms. Murphy was stupendously fine as Ruth Sherwood, the wisecracking writer who knows a hundred easy ways to lose a man. The good news is that Ms. Shields is pretty damn fine herself, while her singing isn’t nearly as lame as I’d feared (though she crashed and burned in the two-part harmony of “Ohio”). A nifty physical comedienne, she mugs like a Marx Brother, and though she hasn’t enough vocal oomph to bounce her songs off the back wall of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, I was happily surprised to see how much she managed to make out of her comic numbers.

Guess what? There’s a link! As OGIC mentioned a few days ago, this is the week when the Journal makes its online edition available for free in order to attract new subscribers. So if you want to read the whole thing, go here–then browse around at your leisure and see how you like the rest of the paper. I’m prejudiced, but I think the Journal Online is one of the best deals in journalism. See for yourself.