Archives for 2005

Friday again, but this week I didn’t review any new plays in my Wall Street Journal drama column. Instead I took a look back at American theater in 2005:

What’s wrong with Broadway? Nothing–and everything. Yes, I saw several Broadway shows I liked in the year just past, and a few that I loved. But only one of them, Joe Mantello’s revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” originated there. With that lone exception, all of the plays, productions and performances that impressed me most in 2005 came from Off Broadway, England or out of town.

Such is the new reality of American theater. Given the fearsome costs of mounting a Broadway production, nobody in his right mind is likely to gamble on a property that doesn’t already have a solid track record. So in looking back on the year’s highlights, I’ve decided to give Broadway a miss. Readers of this column already know how well I thought of “Doubt,” “The Light in the Piazza,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” What were the other must-see shows and performances, in New York and elsewhere?

No link, so for the answer, go out and buy a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my drama column (along with lots of other art-related stories). Start the year right!

UPDATE: The Journal has just posted a free link to this column. To read it, go here.

I’d tell you what I did all week, except that I didn’t do much of anything. I got eight hours of sleep every night and had breakfast every morning. I wrote two pieces, taking my time with both of them. I read a couple of books (right now I’m midway through Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede) and watched a half-dozen old movies. I took my mother out to dinner twice, eating as sensibly as it’s possible to eat in southeast Missouri, not many of whose restaurants are heart-healthy. (If you know anything about Smalltown, U.S.A., you won’t be surprised to hear that I stayed as far away as possible from this one.) I talked on the phone to Our Girl and a few friends with whom I hadn’t spoken since I went into the hospital, but for the most part I fell pleasantly out of touch with the world.

That was my week, and now it’s over. I’ll be spending most of today making my slow way from my mother’s house in Smalltown to my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I’m reliably informed that several bags’ worth of snail mail await me. (Yes, it’s mostly press releases, but apparently it looks intimidating.) I have a play to see on Saturday afternoon and another on Monday evening. I have pieces due next Tuesday and Thursday, and I head up to Boston a week from today to cover a revival of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.

At first blush it sounds as if nothing has changed–and yet everything has changed, for I know that in between these various events I must live my life very differently, if I want to live at all. I have an appointment with my cardiologist on Tuesday. I expect him to lecture me sternly on all manner of things, and I mean to do just as he says. My list of New Year’s resolutions is growing fast: I do solemnly swear to eat breakfast every day, go to the gym every weekday, spend a little time enjoying the Teachout Museum every afternoon, pay a visit or two to Central Park every week…et cetera, et cetera. I’m full of good intentions–how could I not be? But this is the most important one of all: I promise not to fall back into my old ways the first time I slip up. Because I will, repeatedly. Learning to live differently is no small task, least of all for a middle-aged workaholic accustomed to doing as he pleases, and New York is full of temptations.

No sooner will I step off the plane Friday afternoon than I’ll feel the overwhelming urge to rev up my own engines, to rush back to my apartment and empty all those mailbags and start calling up everyone I know. Only I won’t. I’ll sit down, look happily at the art hanging on my living-room walls, and wait for the knot of tension inside my head to start unwinding. Then I’ll take Cole Porter’s advice: Why don’t we try staying home?

That’s my plan, anyway. Wish me luck–and a happy New Year!

“A job is home to a homeless man.”

Clifford Odets, The Country Girl

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Feb. 1)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

“If I got out of this, I would know it for ever. I would be grateful for every breath I breathed, every meal I ate, every night I felt the cool kiss of sheets, the peace of a bed behind a closed, a locked, door. Why had I never known this before? Why had my parents, my lost religion, never taught it to me? Anyway, I knew now. I had found it out for myself. Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger.”

Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (courtesy of Eric Felten)

Box of Books offers up five good reasons to read Henry James. I’m touched by the protectiveness of the post generally, and particularly by this intimation that he’s discussed routinely enough to be the continual butt of humorous remarks at fashionable parties: “But I do like him, and in an effort to share the love, here’s five reasons why you shouldn’t laugh on cue the next time someone makes a Henry James joke.” Unless you are going to be running into the ghost of H. G. Wells–

It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea, which has got to the corner of its den.

–it doesn’t seem all that likely an eventuality. I think we should all agree now, though, that if any of us do find ourselves in such a painful situation we’ll channel and even escalate Box of Books‘s admirable protective instinct, make a beeline for our coats, and storm out in righteous indignation. C’mon, he’s the Master, it’s the least you can do!

(Link courtesy of Dan Green.)

Of the new books I read and reviewed this year, these were the most memorable:

– Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

– Caryl Philips, Dancing in the Dark

– Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

– Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack

– Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers

– Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir

Ruhlman is the exception here for contributing the only nonfiction title and for being the author whose other books I wasted the least time in acquiring–I believe Amazon had my order before I had finished off House. More on the delightful Mr. Ruhlman very soon–he has provided all of my pleasure reading for the last little while, I’m a little fixated on his work, and I’m in the middle of writing a long post about why. With any luck at all, I’ll get it up here tomorrow night. With a bit more luck, I’ll find time to say a little something about all of the titles listed above shortly thereafter. Stay tuned.

Last night I posted links to outstanding recent examples of blogger criticism, struck yet again by how thoroughly some bloggers are outperforming their counterparts in print. Now this morning I discover Tim Hulsey’s fantastic post on Brokeback Mountain that has determined me to see the film. Here’s a clip that gets to the heart of the matter:

For most of the film, Lee seems content to exploit and subvert convention, while subtly teaching his audiences new and more humane ways to experience cinema. In the closing scenes, however, Brokeback Mountain careens into what for most American audiences will be emotional terra incognita, with grief too deep for words or tears. In a way, the film is designed to prepare us for these final moments, when we’re compelled to identify with a form of love that most of us have been conditioned not to take seriously. The film is a plea for empathy, not just in society or politics but in the American cinema as a whole–and it is in this last regard that Brokeback may be most revolutionary.

You should read the whole beautifully written, assiduously contextualized piece. Very little in current newspaper or magazine film criticism is the equal of Tim’s work here or, indeed, the reviews I linked to in the post immediately below. I find rampant blogger triumphalism just as annoying as the next person, but to say that blogs like My Stupid Dog are lapping the print media seems to me to be simply stating the facts.

I’m back in Chicago tonight, much against my will, and I’m afraid I don’t have much left in the tank, figuratively or literally. Christmas was lovely but it was brutally compressed and fleeting. Can it have been only yesterday? My family was in nonstop action from ten in the morning until eleven at night, and when I awoke this morning the bags had to be packed and loaded, the kitty-cat medicated (pink calm-down pills to which she seems impervious), the road hit.

I’m kind of expecting the day at work tomorrow to shred me. But I hope and plan nevertheless to get something of some substance up here in the evening, however folded, spindled, and mutilated I may emerge. In the meantime, allow me to point you toward worthy content elsewhere:

– Cinetrix gifts us with not one, but two reviews of recent films over at Pullquote. They are David Cronenberg’s History of Violence and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach’s film KIcking and Screaming recently made my Meme of Four list. (She also had a grade-A celeb sighting to ring in the holidays.)

– Quiet Bubble, a recent discoverer of Jane Austen, has posted a typically sharp review of the newest film adaptation. QB just gets better and better.

– Top-ten lists of the year’s best cultural offerings are well and good and, well, unavoidable. I prefer the tack taken by M.S. Smith at CultureSpace, a brief conversational essay that doesn’t confine itself to things that were new in 2005, but to things that were new to Smith. This has been up for a couple of weeks already, for all of which time I’ve been meaning to link to it. If I were to make a list of my top ten cultural discoveries of 2005, CultureSpace and Quiet Bubble would definitely be on it.

– More bookishly, Newsday has a round-up of several critics’ favorite reads of the year. Among the experts are ALN blogroll mainstays Maud Newton and James Marcus. Remember, many of the books named will be published in paperback right around the corner (herein, I think, lies the real usefulness of these lists, to remind us of everything we failed to read but can soon read more cheaply by virtue of lagging).

Finally, an administrative note. I owe several of you email. Thanks awfully for writing, and please bear with me one more day. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.

Not only am I not dead yet, but I’m back in The Wall Street Journal today with a review of two shows, Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life:

George Bernard Shaw had all the defects of all his virtues. He offered Edwardian theatergoers a heady brew of progressive ideas–but the left-wing notions that propelled his once-controversial plays long ago lost their power to shock. His characters were forever tossing off speeches that crackled and fizzed with wit–but they never knew when to shut up. Even the best of his plays can be unutterably tedious in anything short of a near-perfect performance. Am I surprised, then, that the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is so exciting? Not even slightly. When it comes to my favorite Off Broadway company, I take such marvels for granted….

I wasn’t around for the 1975 New York Shakespeare Festival revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which starred Lynn Redgrave and Ruth Gordon, but I can’t imagine it having been superior to this production, which ranks with “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Sweeney Todd” at the top of my list of new shows worth seeing….

It’s not ungentlemanly to say that Chita Rivera is 72, since she makes no secret of it. Nor has she sought to conceal the fact that her “autobiographical” show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” was written by playwright Terrence McNally. For that matter, “The Dancer’s Life” isn’t even a one-woman show: Ms. Rivera does nearly all the talking, but she’s backed by an ensemble of ten dancers and an on-stage orchestra. So if you were expecting something similar to “At Liberty,” Elaine Stritch’s brassily candid solo show about life upon the wicked stage, you’re going to be surprised by “The Dancer’s Life,” which feels more like an as-told-to musical than a hot-dish gossipfest. It’s brisk, slick, just a little bit impersonal–and boundlessly entertaining….

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or give yourself a Christmas present by going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).