Archives for February 2005

Last fall, a friend asked me to join his Pub Trivia team. This sort of thing is totally my cup of tea–you readers may think you already have a fair sense of the depths of my nerdiness, but you don’t know the half of it.

Little surprise, then, that the trivia took, and over the months I’ve learned–and imbibed–a lot. The team has even made a little money. But the single most important and immutable thing I have learned at Pub Trivia is this:

The answers you don’t know on Tuesday night will be dropped in your lap by a fickle fate on, roughly, Wednesday morning. Right after you don’t need them anymore. You can practically set your watch.

For example, in January we missed a question about something that happens in the first few pages of the Watchmen comic book. Later that week, one team member received from his brother, as a late Hanukkah gift, Watchmen. A quite late Hanukkah gift, I might add.

Then last week we were asked who wrote the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” and were stumped. We made a respectable if uninspired guess of Willie Nelson; the answer turned out to be Kris Kristofferson; we grumbled and sighed and hit each other upside the head, and eventually came in second.

Fast forward to last night. I’m working on the laptop with the Grammys on as background noise, glancing up only occasionally. Hey, who’s that strolling across the stage and into my living room? Oh, look at that, it’s Kris Kristofferson, introducing a Janis Joplin tribute. What’s that he’s saying? Oh, it’s “I wrote ‘Me and Bobby McGee,'” more or less. Oh, Kris Kristofferson! You sing, you write, you act, you probably dance and juggle, you’re a Rhodes Scholar, but oh, your execrable timing.

This just in from the Grammy Awards:

Category 49

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

Concert in the Garden

Maria Schneider Orchestra

Our heartfelt congratulations!

My life is a congeries of implausibly cool things, some large and some small, and one of the coolest of them is the fact that I meet the most interesting people. On Thursday, for example, I got to share a studio at WNYC-FM with Dan Hicks, whose music I’ve loved for thirty years. I’m pleased to report that he is–as I expected and hoped–the very soul of unflappability.

If you weren’t listening live to yesterday’s Soundcheck, on which I talked about Pat Metheny, go here to download the archived version. It’s not that I said anything stupefyingly brilliant in the first half of the show (though I had great fun as usual batting the conversational ball back and forth with host John Schaefer). No, the news of the day was that Hicks had everybody in the control room rolling on the floor as he chatted amiably about his new Hot Licks album, Selected Shorts. I plan to buy a copy the next time I get within five blocks of a record store. (O.K., ten.)

You’ll also hear Hicks trot out a brand-new word, equivalate:

I was more acoustic…but I was able to play right along in rock contexts, and it was talked about in Rolling Stone right away, which I liked–which I equivalate to maybe pop.

That’s an excellent word. Don’t go looking for it in the dictionary–yet–but I certainly plan to work it into my pieces as often as possible from now on.

How lucky am I? So way.

I had a lovely week at the theater, and today’s drama column, in which I review The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and the Storm Theatre’s revival of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, is proof thereof.

Putnam County is soooo da bomb:

Sometimes you can tell how good a show is going to be as soon as it starts. “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” was like that. The lights went down, the five-piece orchestra struck up, and an anxious-looking teenager walked on stage and sang, “At the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee/My parents keep on telling me/Just being here is winning/Although/I know it isn’t so.” Pow! All at once Second Stage Theatre was filled with the warm, knowing laughter of a roomful of people who knew they were about to have their socks charmed off.

Let me pause for a moment so you can go right out and buy tickets, because William Finn, the writer-composer of “Falsettos” and “A New Brain,” and Rachel Sheinkin, author of the funniest musical-comedy book to come along in years, have blown the bull’s-eye off the target. “Putnam County” (as I’ll call it for short) is that rarity of rarities, a super-smart show that is also a bonafide crowd-pleaser. Directed by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator, it’s the best new musical I’ve covered, “Avenue Q” included, since I started writing this column. In fact, it’s the best show in town, and if it doesn’t move to Broadway sooner rather than later (it runs off Broadway through March 6), I’ll cook and eat my unabridged dictionary….

I had almost as much fun at The Shoemaker’s Holiday:

Thomas Dekker’s “The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” first performed in 1600, hasn’t received a major New York production since 1937, when Orson Welles staged it for his Mercury Theatre. Now it’s being presented by the Storm Theatre, a tiny troupe of which I’d never heard until its press release popped up in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago (the company performs in a black-box theater a block from Broadway). The only reason I bothered to go was because I’d never seen Dekker’s most popular play on stage.

Well, guess what? It’s a peach. Peter Dobbins, artistic director of the Storm Theatre, strikes a perfect balance between bawdiness and deep feeling, something that Welles’ heavily cut, coarsely comic staging failed by all accounts to do. Dekker’s prithee-put-a-sock-in-it-old-codswallop dialogue is played to the hilt, especially by Hugh Brandon Kelly, the shoemaker-turned-sheriff (I’d kill for a big bass voice like that), and shameless scene-stealing is the order of the day (Amanda Cronk makes the funniest faces imaginable). Yet the serious parts are given full value, too….

No link. Do the newsstand thing, or the online edition thing.

P.S. Since my review went to press, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has extended its off-Broadway run to March 20. Don’t wait for it to move to Broadway–go now.

“Deep in his heart he hankers to be an artist of some sort, but he is only an actor. To be an actor was his adolescent dream and has been his means of livelihood for fifty years or more; but although he has no complaints about that (indeed it would be ungrateful of him to make any) he knows that an actor is usually no more than an assortment of odds and ends which barely add up to a whole man. An actor is an interpreter of other men’s words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents.”

Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

When most people imagine an ideal vacation, they head toward the equator in their minds. I dream in the opposite direction, magnetically attracted toward the nearest pole, to places like the Scottish Highlands and Denali National Park. Perhaps this, in addition to hockey love and frequent youthful border crossings, explains my lifelong Canada crush. Or perhaps mutual adoration set in after my star turn in a 1970s television spot for the CBC kiddie show The Friendly Giant (I was discovered in a Toronto park, mastered my line “I like Jerome the Giraffe” like a pro, and received one pre-Loonie Canadian dollar for my trouble.) I don’t know–as with most crushes, I’m less interested in understanding it than enjoying it. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with my getting a lot of enjoyment lately out of the newish CBC arts site. A few highlights:

– An appreciation/lamentation of Arrested Development–appreciating the show, lamenting the non-viewers who are dealing it a slow but certain death–here. Notable quote:

Maybe Arrested Development is the last great sitcom we’ll get for free.

– A snappy overview of recent movies about weddings, here. NQ:

As the movie wedding approaches, the bride is destined to be relieved of that thing called “agency,” and she’s grateful for it. At the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos, looking like a cloud vomited on her, thanks her family for their intolerance and intrusion. For a while pre-nuptially, she was actually in the process of toughening up and learning to stand up to her bossy family, but weddings demand the softening of women. Even the excellent The Philadelphia Story required Katherine Hepburn to slough off her haughty Hepburnness so Cary Grant could steal her away from the uptight idiot she only thought she liked. The transformation from calloused cellar sweeper to Cinderella princess is easy; just stick a toe into a glittery, loan-financed slipper. In modern wedding movies, love and marriage turns Type A career women–Roberts in Runaway Bride; Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner–into…what?

– An anti-book-club rant, here. I’ve never been in a book club, so the author’s pretty much singing to the choir here. In my experience, enough years of grad school tend to undermine the appeal. I myself am far more inclined to form a television club.

– This nuanced piece about the problems, aesthetic and ethical, inherent in making a film about genocide. This subject has been on my mind in a half-processed way lately, simply because I want to go see Hotel Rwanda but have failed to try to talk a friend into it. Nobody in my circle is apparently inclined to go. That doesn’t mean they won’t–but it does mean that to get them to, I have to do something akin to talking it up. Hmnh. Given the subject matter, I haven’t found any way of doing this that won’t surely sound bizarre or even ghoulish.

NQ:

Of course, such unimaginable moments have occurred, and are occurring, but do they lose their power when they become cinematic tropes, reducing horror to a plot point or a hero’s redemption? The danger of moviemaking is that it somehow levels genocide, and evil becomes as significant, or insignificant, as the predictable beats of a thriller or an epic weepie.

Speaking of neologisms (which Terry was here) and of Lance Mannion (which I was here), I like Lance’s neologism “Almodovarianally” in that same post, though to my ear something about that word wants to be stretched out even longer–to, say, “Almodovarianesqueishly.”

It’s like we used to say in high school: “You can beat a dead gift horse against the current, but you can’t make him drink spilt milk.”

And that, I think, is a sufficiently ridiculous note on which to close shop for the weekend. Have a good one.

One last reminder: I’ll be on WNYC-FM’s Soundcheck this afternoon, talking about the Pat Metheny Group’s new CD, The Way Up, an hour-long jazz composition by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays that’s just been released by Nonesuch. I’ll also be talking about other attempts by jazz composers to grapple with the problem of large-scale form.

In addition, Dan Hicks–yes, that Dan Hicks–will be stopping by the studio to talk about his new album, Selected Shorts. I’ve been a Hot Licks fan ever since high school (in fact, I’m listening to Where’s the Money? as I write these words), and I’m soooo looking forward to meeting His Coolness.

Soundcheck airs live in New York at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about today’s show, to tune in online via streaming audio, or to listen after the fact by accessing the Soundcheck archive, go here. I’ll be heard at the top of the hour.

Give a listen.