Archives for November 2005

Time again for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I covered three shows this week–The Woman in White, Bach in Leipzig, and the Classic Stage Company’s Hamlet–and my guess is that you’re going to be surprised by my reaction to the first of them. I sure was:

Andrew Lloyd Webber, once the infallible cash machine of big-budget musical comedy, lost his touch a decade ago and has been AWOL from Broadway ever since. Now he’s back–in both senses–with “The Woman in White,” a stage version of Wilkie Collins’ 1860 shocker about two half-sisters (Maria Friedman and Jill Paice) who fall into the clutches of a murderous pair of swindling noblemen (Ron Bohmer and Michael Ball). Ms. Friedman, who underwent breast-cancer surgery two weeks ago, returned to the show last Thursday in a front-page display of true grit. No less newsworthy, though, is Mr. Lloyd Webber’s own return to form. Not only is “The Woman in White” a solid three-base hit, but for much of its length it proves to be a highly impressive piece of musical theater as well.

Not being a fan of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s high-priced brand of kitsch, I confess to having been taken aback by the first act of “The Woman of White,” whose witty domestic tone suggests a cross between “Pride and Prejudice” and “Dracula.” Far more than merely fluent, it is at once beautifully paced and unabashedly operatic in scale (so much so that the canned sound of the synthesizer-laden, overly loud pit orchestra does the score a great disservice). The second act, alas, is less memorable–Mr. Lloyd Webber’s big tunes, here as ever, are too obvious to be distinguished–but it holds together dramatically, and though I came away with an unmistakable sense of missed opportunities, “The Woman in White” is still an exceedingly well-made entertainment that will send you home sated….

If you like super-smart silliness, head downtown to the New York Theatre Workshop and be ready to laugh until your ribs are sore. Comparisons between Itamar Moses’ “Bach at Leipzig” and Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” are inevitable–indeed, Mr. Stoppard wrote the preface to the published version of his younger colleague’s play–but the good news is that Mr. Moses is up to the challenge. In “Bach in Leipzig” he takes a typically Stoppardian historical situation (seven famous organists auditioning for the same high-profile church job in 18th-century Leipzig) and turns it into a who’s-on-first farce full of theatrical trickery and fizzy verbal slapstick….

Michael Cumpsty, lately of “The Constant Wife,” is one of those ultra-reliable craftsmen whose name on a program always makes me perk up. Now he’s given us something much finer than mere craftsmanship: a Classic Stage Company production of “Hamlet” in which he turns in a thoroughly superior performance of the title role….

No link, as usual. To read the whole thing, of which there’s a bit more than usual (the Journal kindly gave me extra space this week), buy a copy of this morning’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, an incredible and insufficiently appreciated bargain.

October 2003:

I don’t blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren’t especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can’t imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked–the glossy “symphonic score” beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties–in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that’s the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he’s most comfortable.

That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter…

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Payment made to Benjamin Britten by the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1939 to support the writing of Peter Grimes: $1,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,120.80

(Source: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography)

When a girl would catch a fine lad,

She’ll need one weapon to disarm him:

She must charm him,

And then never take her glance off him.

She won’t need a ruffly gown

Nor velvet shoulders to get him.

Once she’s met him,

She just has to charm the pants off him.

And so I fear that I may be stuck

In this same dreary situation,

Maiden station,

Passed up by every lad

Unless I find some charm

I didn’t know I had.

William Roy, “Charm” (music by Roy)

In case you’re new to this blog, two different people post here: Terry Teachout, who lives in New York City, and Our Girl in Chicago, otherwise known as Laura Demanski, who lives in, er, Chicago.

The headlines on Terry’s posts start out with “TT.”

The headlines on Our Girl’s posts start out with “OGIC.”

Enough said. Read on. Enjoy.

As longtime readers know, I’m a big hockey fan, though tonight the sport made mincemeat of my nerves and left me, in the end, sad and wistful. (Thanks for the consolation call, Dad. I have the best dad.)

As longtime readers also know, I occasionally smuggle in hockey content here, though I’m usually decently artful about dressing it up as arts content. Not today. This one’s nakedly a sports post, though it does offer links to a number of good writers–on hockey, natch. But beyond the aesthetic attractions of words strung together nicely that include “goon” and “icing,” this post is in no way arts-related.

Because the vast majority of sports writing is so banal, good sports writing gives me more pleasure than perhaps any other kind of good writing. There’s an element of happy surprise attached to finding something smart and interesting in a desert of hackwork, and there’s a luxury as well to great writing about inconsequential things. At least as much as in the arts, I think, the invention of blogging has enhanced the quantity and quality of worthwhile sports writing out there. Something about the combination of the ephemerality of sports and the passion they inspire makes them a subject perfectly suited for blog coverage. For a hockey fan in this country where we’re considered quaint curiosities, hockey blogs have become nothing less than a lifeline for me to like-minded souls. And since the end of the lockout and the game’s return, it seems to me that the hockey blogging scene has grown especially vibrant and fun. So I share with you a few of the essential stops in my daily hockey blog tour:

– The original: Eric McErlain’s Off Wing Opinion is the granddaddy of hockey blogs, and covers notable news from throughout the sports world. Because Eric’s one of the best known bloggers in all of sports and has a puck and a red line bannering his site, he does a great service to our sadly neglected (in the U.S.) sport, every single day.

– While not, strictly speaking, a hockey blogger, Colby Cosh earns a place on this list because when he does blog hockey, he does it unbeatably. Colby knows a ton about everything, so his hockey posts tend to be, shall we say, broadly informed and inspired.

– Jeff and Alanah at Vancouver Canucks Op-Ed are booksellers and hockey fans. What more need be said? I will say, too, that they’re better than anyone I know at the art of the good-natured insult. This is a formidable skill, and their blog is a delight.

– Dour is one word for Tom Benjamin, who runs the Canucks Corner NHL weblog out of Canucks Corner. Authoritative is another. Smart is another. Half the time you see his name on other blogs, it’s attached to the word “cranky,” but no one who says so would think of skipping his site.

– This one’s new, at least to me, but I’m crazy about Jes Golbez’s Hockey Rants. It’s endlessly entertaining. I look back on Jes’s Halloween gallery of hockey ghouls with particular fondness.

There endeth today’s recruiting effort. Enjoy your weekend.

Speaking of Anna Karenina, which someone was in the post below, I heard a fantastic talk on Anna’s suicide last week and wrote it up very briefly here.

It has been at least fifteen years since I read Tolstoy’s novel, and it’s not a book I ever close-read. So Gary Saul Morson’s observation that Anna, in her last scene, is consciously copying the death of the watchman in her first scene struck me like a jolt of electricity. I always took the rail accident of the first scene as just so much ill boding, which I believe is the standard lazy reading, but Morson exploded it by very simply pointing out that Anna remembers the accident and decides to follow suit: “And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do.” (I’m quoting from this on-line edition.) That’s not foreshadowing, it’s the opposite. Rather than being ready-built as a meaningful sign, the watchman’s death is only retrospectively endowed with significance by Anna and the decision she makes based on her sudden memory of it.

If ever you have the opportunity to hear Morson speak, you should do so.

That’ll do it for the day, and for the week as well (except for the regular Friday drama-column teaser and the usual routine daily stuff). I’m going to try practicing what I’ve been preaching.

Later.