Archives for March 2005

C-SPAN neglected to tell me that “The Problem of Political Art,” the Bradley Lecture I delivered last Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, would be airing on Saturday as part of its American Perspectives series. I’ve been getting e-mail all day from people who saw me holding forth on TV last night. Alas, I was otherwise occupied.

The good news (such as it is) is that anyone with RealVideo can watch the lecture on line as soon as it’s posted on C-SPAN’s Web site. It isn’t up yet, but this is where you’ll be able to find it when the time comes, presumably tomorrow or a little later in the week.

Friday again. The Wall Street Journal again. Theater again. Two shows this week, Harold Prince’s opera-house production of Candide and Woman Before a Glass, a one-woman play about Peggy Guggenheim.

The first I liked very much, with some inescapable but forgivable reservations:

Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” is back on Broadway–almost. New York City Opera, whose Lincoln Center headquarters is a block from Broadway and slightly north of the theater district, has revived its 1982 production of Bernstein’s 1956 operetta. Like the show itself, this “Candide” is flawed, but it definitely works, and unlike the semi-staged concert version presented last spring by the New York Philharmonic, which ran for just four performances, it plays through next Saturday, long enough for the word to get out….

Mr. Prince’s staging (reproduced by Arthur Masella) is full of good, dirty fun. The cast is generally fine, though Mr. Cullum isn’t quite right as Voltaire/Pangloss–he’s broad and bluff, not sharp and sardonic–and Ms. Christy, a very good Cunegonde in her own right, inevitably labors in the shadow of Kristin Chenoweth’s billion-volt performance with the New York Philharmonic. Nor is the New York State Theater well suited to Richard Wilbur’s quick-witted lyrics, which are best heard in a smaller house, ideally on Broadway.

Still, any “Candide” is infinitely better than none at all, and this one is performed with zesty, infectious relish….

The second I thought less successful as a show, but the acting redeems all:

Mercedes Ruehl has taken up residence at the Promenade Theatre, where she is starring in “Woman Before a Glass,” a one-woman play by Lanie Robertson about the life and loves of the late Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress turned art dealer who bought a Venetian palazzo and filled it with her 260-piece collection of avant-garde paintings and sculpture….

Ms. Ruehl is in splendid, even spectacular form. Never having met Guggenheim, I can’t tell you whether her performance is true to life, but it’s full of life, outrageous and uproarious and, in the end, pitiful….

No link, needless to say. To read the whole thing, buy today’s Journal at your favorite newsstand, or go here and subscribe to the online edition. (I recommend the latter.)

“Not many of the living are so real as the dead that are beloved.”

Stark Young, letter to Thomas Wolfe (March 2, 1936)

I have to be somewhere else this morning, but fling a fistful of cookies behind me as I head out the door…

“What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.” (All About Eve)


“What are you a wizard?! A genius?!” (Best in Show)


“Two dollars!” (Better Off Dead)


“I’ll meet you at the place where we did that thing that time.” (Broadcast News)


“You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.” (Duck Soup)


“What are you lookin’ at?” “I’m lookin’ at a tin star with a drunk pinned on it.” (El Dorado)


“I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” (In a Lonely Place)


“It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” (The Maltese Falcon)

Back later.

I returned from Washington this afternoon to find in my e-mailbox this note from a friend who’s been worrying about my reputation:

Remember when I said you shouldn’t hit every deadline so reliably, because it will make some dunderhead think you’re not an artist? In the same spirit, I want you to slow down a little. I want you to start spreading stories of your suffering–up at night, anguished at the burden of capturing such a great man’s art, honored by the opportunity to find and focus on Satchmo, listening over and over to his early recordings, hitting the crystal meth a little too hard. (We’ll think about that last one.) I just think many people are surprisingly primitive, even intellectuals, sometimes especially intellectuals, and are inclined to see truth in clich

“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

Hot out of the box with a brand-new cinematic meme is Cinetrix, who asks:

What movie character do you identify with the most?

Me, I alternate between the guy who speaks the lines quoted immediately below
and Jack Baker, the jazzier of The Fabulous Baker Boys. I guess that’s a pretty dire thing to admit about yourself, but it’s late, I’m tired, you know how it is….

(By the way, I have lots of funny stories to tell about my trips to and from Washington, but they’ll have to wait until I get back for good and in one piece. Be patient–all will be made manifest.)

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