Archives for 2004

I wrote enthusiastically
a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal about the new Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which I found both convincing and moving. My critical brethren, however, varied widely in their views of the show, and not a few of them found the tone of the production to be insufficiently Jewish. This struck me as wrongheaded–especially since some of the critics in question were about as Jewish as pastrami on white with mayo–and I resolved to write something about it. Then I saw that Blake Eskin of Nextbook, an online magazine about “Jewish literature, culture and ideas,” had beaten me to the counterpunch:

Peter Marks of the Washington Post, whose critique of the ensemble’s pronunciation of mazel tov places him firmly in the chorus of authenticity-seekers, suggests a deeper reason for their fierce disapproval. “In the secular Jewish home of my childhood, about the closest we ever came to spiritual sustenance was Fiddler on the Roof,” he writes. The original cast album was in heavy rotation on the Marks family hi-fi; his father sang “If I Were a Rich Man” in the car; his brother played Tevye at summer camp. “Anyone expecting an experience that reenergizes a connection stretching back four decades will be sorely disappointed,” he says.

For Marks, I suspect, and for his contemporaries weaned on Fiddler, the real problem with this production is not its thin Yiddish flavor, but its failure as ritual, its inability to trigger warm memories of childhood. It’s as if he’s returned to his old bedroom, found a new blanket on the bed, and decided that the mattress isn’t as cozy as it once was. The problem is, it will never be as comfortable as the one you remember….

Read the whole thing here, please. I couldn’t have put it better. Now I needn’t try.

“A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

O.K., who sent me the cherry sapling? I want an answer and I want it now.

‘Fess up, please.

We’ve now looked at all the e-mail sent in response to our recent request that the readers of “About Last Night” write to tell us how often and when they read this blog.

Most of you, it turns out, read us daily, and most of our daily readers visit “About Last Night” more than once a day. No particular time of day stood out in your responses, though our Site Meter says that our peak hours coincide roughly with lunchtime. We can see the wave of fresh hits rolling across the U.S. time zones between noon and three p.m. each weekday.

Most bloggers don’t post on weekends, but we started doing it several months ago and have kept it up. Comparatively few of you, however, read us on Saturdays and Sundays, a fact we already knew from the Site Meter. Even so, we still draw roughly 1,500 page views each weekend, which is unexpectedly high. (All told, “About Last Night” received about 44,000 page views in February.)

Though neither one of us uses an RSS feed, we decided to make our postings available via XML syndication, but so far it seems that very few of you read “About Last Night” via RSS, and three or four readers wrote to say that they didn’t know what it was. (To find out, go here.)

One of the reasons we asked you to write was to find out whether it makes sense for us to continue posting every day. It isn’t easy, but judging by your e-mail, it’s definitely worth the trouble. Frankly, we were astonished by the number of daily communicants. So we’ll keep our noses to the grindstone (though we might slack off a bit on weekends, if you don’t mind).

Finally, we want to share these snippets from the mail you sent us:

– “I’m a regular reader, usually during my lunch hour. Your cultural
conversations with the cerebral pin-up OGIC makes each work day go easier.”

– “first thing in the west coast morning I check for email, then jump to
the browser and read your blog
later in the day, sometimes several times, and especially when i’m
procrastinating, i check to see if anything new has been posted
daily? yes — even on weekends, and even when you say you won’t be
posting cuz you’re writing for $ or sleeping or…”

– “I think I first found my way there via TMFTML, but as a
Chicagoan it may have been through something about Our Girl–I can’t quite
remember.”

(We shudder to think which of Mr. TMFTML’s postings brought you from there to here!)

– “Here’s my online routine every morning: First, check my
e-mail, even though I don’t need a penis enlarger, either. Then, look
at the day’s Dilbert column, see what’s being reviewed at Classics
Today, scope out the new stuff at ArtsJournal, and from there see
what you and Our Girl have posted in the past 24 hours….I scroll through other blogs only very rarely, because I just don’t
have that kind of time. I do occasionally follow one of your links,
but frankly I’d rather settle in for five or six or ten of your solid
paragraphs than devote a few precious seconds of my time to the
shorter and generally less substantial posts that typify much of what
I’ve seen of blogdom. In other words, what I prefer to read on the
screen more closely resembles what I’d find in a magazine or
newspaper than a blurb on a book’s dust jacket.”

– “I try to read artsjournal.com everyday that I’m in my office (three days a week)

Our Girl and I had a quadruple-header yesterday. Not only did we go see “Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts” and Sweeney Todd and have a pre-dinner drink with Beatrice, but we came home so full of energy that we decided to watch a movie, too. She’d never seen The Fabulous Baker Boys, to my astonishment (it’s only one of my all-time favorite films), so that was our choice. I’ll leave it to her to describe all these events, but later: Supermaud is en route to the Teachout Museum, and we expect to hear her knock on the door at any moment.

In the meantime, please note that the diminutive Ms. Newton isn’t the only blogger to be publishing in the Washington Post this morning: this is also the appointed day for “Second City,” my monthly Post column about the arts in New York City. You can read it on line by going to the “Second City” module in the right-hand column and clicking on the appropriate link.

Oops, there she is. Time for OGIC to remove her silken mask….

“Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening–nobody on the stage at least. That’s why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war.”

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings

Our Girl (who says hi) and I just got back from seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Taylor’s Sunset, Dream Girls, and Promethean Fire at City Center. If you’re in New York, go. If not, eat your heart out.

We’ll both be blogging about tonight’s performance at some point in the next day or two, but not just yet. Aside from having a lot of catching up to do, we’re planning to watch L’Atalante before crashing.

In the meantime, here are a few fresh links for you to chew on:

– SlowLearner looks at the high cost of playgoing in New York from the perspective of a budding playwright:

Sometimes reading Time Out New York puts me in despair. One of the reasons I moved to New York was all the theater, right? Just about everything goes up here at some point. I can catch everything, see what everybody is up to – a nonstop showroom of all the latest thoughts and innovations in playwriting, staging, design, and performance.

Of course they all cost about sixty dollars.

Okay, that’s not fair. I go to plays all the time that cost fifteen dollars. Showcases, Off-Off-type stuff. Some of which is terrific. But I’m always aware when I’m paying fifteen dollars to get into a play that I’m about to see one of those labors of love that will lose the laborers themselves at least several hundred dollars and probably several thousand.

So I understand why the producers of new plays by Tracy Letts, Doug Wright, Nicky Silver, Alice Tuan, Charles L. Mee, Wallace Shawn, A.R. Gurney, Bryony Lavery, Howard Korder, Craig Lucas, or Paul Rudnick might want to charge a bit more than fifteen dollars admission. They’re trying to run a business. (No snickering in the back, please.)

Here’s the thing: between the basic expenses of my existence, the non-theater things I do for fun, the occasional steep requirements like air travel, shoes, or dental work, and the various fifteen dollar plays I attend because the people in those plays came and saw my fifteen dollar play, I can really only go to one of these $50-60 deals about once every six weeks….

– Superfluities, another playwright-blogger, has a funny take on my posting from yesterday on bad theatrical press releases:

As a former publicist myself, I see his point about the hopelessly reductive nature of a press release which has the potential of rendering the most sublime into the most banal. Who would see these plays?

* Two homeless men wait for a man who never comes. Then they do it again.

* A family of actors sits around talking for four-and-a-half hours before they’re interrupted by their drug-addict mother.

* An architect falls in love with a girl a third his age, then jumps off the roof of a church.

* A Danish prince can’t decide who to kill, then kills everybody. (This world premiere production explores the ways we change, the compromises we make, and the price we pay for our life choices.)

O.K., I give up–point taken!

– While we’re in a theatrical mood, here’s a story from the New York Post that needs no comment from me:

For the glittering first-night audience at “Fiddler on the Roof” last week, the sudden death of Jerome Robbins’ sister just before the curtain went up was a terrible tragedy.

But for the show’s musicians, it was a chance to grab some overtime.

In what is surely the most ridiculous example of union overreach since the stagehands used to make producers pay for someone to raise the curtain on shows that had no curtain, the musicians at “Fiddler” have put in for overtime for the opening-night performance, which was delayed due to Sonia Cullinen’s death in the theater that night.

According to union rules, if a performance runs more than three hours, musicians are entitled to overtime. “Fiddler” was supposed to begin at 6:30 p.m., but it was delayed for almost an hour as paramedics tried to revive Cullinen, 91, who had collapsed in the aisle….

All together now: eeuuww!

See you tomorrow. Jean Vigo awaits.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t plug the Inflation Calculator often enough. It’s a Web site that allows you to adjust for inflation any given amount of money (in American dollars) in any year between 1800 and 2002, in either direction. If that sounds boring, think again. I use the Inflation Calculator at least once a week in my work, and I can’t tell you how many times I used it in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.

Here’s an example: I was reading a biography of Benny Goodman this morning, in which it was mentioned in passing that Goodman paid Cootie Williams, one of the top trumpeters of the Swing Era, $200 a week in 1940. O.K., fine–but go to the Inflation Calculator and within seconds you’ll know that in today’s dollars, Williams made $2,493.29 a week, or $129,651.08 a year. That’s pretty serious money now, even more so for a black jazz trumpeter playing with a white dance band in 1940…and you didn’t really know how good a salary it was, did you?

That’s what makes the Inflation Calculator so useful to anyone writing about the arts. Unless you’re an economist, you’re likely to have only the haziest notion of what a dollar was worth in 1940, or 1840, or even 1975. (What cost $200 in 1975 cost $701.80 in 2002. Surprised?) Yet that kind of information is indispensable to understanding the implications of, say, a novel about life in 1940, or a biography of a painter that tells how much a particular canvas sold for in 1928. It changes the way you think about the past.

Enough said? Bookmark the Inflation Calculator today. Use it. You can always find it in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column.