Archives for 2005

That’s the phrase dancers use to describe a performance that is…well, a bit erratic. It’s one of my favorite pieces of professional argot, not to mention a pretty good way to sum up the past week and a half. I’ve been all over the place, seen all sorts of things, written far too many pieces, and hung out with some of my favorite people–including two bloggers whom I was meeting for the first time, even though I already “knew” them well from cyberspace.

Here are some snapshots from the maelstrom:

• It all started two Wednesdays ago when I went to a press preview of Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, a new jukebox musical that I loathed, very much in contrast to the collective opinion of the audience and–as it turned out–most of my colleagues.

• No, I didn’t care for the music, but that’s not the main thing wrong with the show. After all, I don’t like the music in Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do, either, but I adored the movie. So what’s the problem? I’ll start with an e-mail that a smart friend sent to me after reading my review:

my youth in the mid-60s was spent at jones beach with other families who had very little, eating pb&j sandwiches with ears pressed to transistor radios radio counting down the top 20. the four seasons were nyc’s stick-ball answer to the beatles and the beach boys and the energy level was very new york back then (63-68-ish). the four seasons compared to the beatles and beach boys was almost race music. it was pure subway. now, with sinatra dead and tony all but a wax museum piece (when was he not), seems valli is perfectly poised to become the patron saint of all things mall….

Jersey Boys tells you all this, but it doesn’t show you any of it, because it isn’t a play but a string of first-person monologues separated by occasional stretches of stilted dialogue (just like Lennon, which was even worse). That’s why it’s so dead on stage. Even a one-person show, which in a sense is all in the telling, has to find a way to break free of mere narration–otherwise it never comes to life. There’s a reason why we call a show a show.

• On Thursday morning I arose at 4:45 and caught a six a.m. train to Washington for the winter meeting of the National Council on the Arts, which began at nine. I slept all the way down and arrived on time (well, almost).

Our closed sessions are strictly confidential, so I can’t tell you anything about what we discussed on Thursday. Instead, I’ll fast-forward to the Washington Ballet performance I attended that evening at Kennedy Center, accompanied by my friend Ali. She’d never seen George Balanchine’s Serenade, which opened the program. I looked at her when it was over, and I’m fairly sure I saw a tear or two. Then she smiled. “Couldn’t we just see that one twice more instead of the other pieces on the program?” she asked. I know how she felt. I remember my first Serenade, which I saw eighteen years ago from the cheap seats of New York’s City Center, courtesy of Dance Theatre of Harlem. It had the same effect on me. It has the same effect on everyone.

• The next morning I returned to the Old Post Office to join my fellow council members for a public session. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, always makes sure that our meetings include some kind of performance–even if it’s nothing more than the playing of a suitable record–so we started the day by listening to Louis Armstrong’s 1933 recording of Basin Street Blues, thereby paying tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the determination of the survivors to bring art back to New Orleans. It was a lovely, utterly appropriate moment.

Midway through the meeting we paused to make the acquaintance of Wayne Henderson, a guitar maker from a very small town in Virginia (pop. 7, or so he says) who is the subject of Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, a new book by Allen St. John. Henderson, a short, shy, unassuming man, is an NEA National Heritage Fellow. He played “Wildwood Flower” and “Black Mountain Rag” on one of his own handmade guitars, and as I listened, I delighted in the fact that my government had had the wisdom to pay official homage to so deserving an artisan.

At meeting’s end Dana noted the death of Shirley Horn, one of last year’s NEA Jazz Fellows, who had been buried the day before in Washington. Then we listened in silence to her recording of “If You Love Me.” The silence grew thick as an early-morning fog as she sang the last verse:

When at last our life on earth is through,
I will share eternity with you.
If you love me, really love me,
Let it happen, I won’t care.

I was thinking about the haircut I’d gotten in New York earlier in the week. The barber tied a dark blue apron around my neck, and it seemed as if all the freshly trimmed hair falling on it was either gray or white. So here it is at last, the distinguished thing, I told myself with an invisible shrug of pretended indifference to the all too visible evidence of the downward slope. Of course there are worse things than being on the verge of your fiftieth birthday–starting, needless to say, with the alternative–but that doesn’t make it any cheerier to contemplate, or easier to explain to younger friends still full of great expectations and innocent of grim foreknowledge. In middle age you find yourself saying goodbye to all that, a dream at a time, until one day the winds grow colder/And suddenly you’re older….

“The one hundred fifty-sixth meeting of the National Council on the Arts is now adjourned,” Dana said softly, and banged his gavel once. A half-hour later I was on a train bound for New York.

• A few hours after that, I was sitting on the aisle at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater, getting ready to watch Propeller perform Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, accompanied by another young friend who was unexpectedly understanding of the night thoughts churning around inside the head of a tired critic with miles to go before he slept.

“Omigod, Terry, you look awful,” she said. “Aren’t you getting any sleep? Are you going to make it through the week in one piece?”

“Oh, sure. I always do, don’t I? I have this, you know,” I replied, waving one hand at the stage. “It’s what I live off. It’s just about the only illusion you get to hang onto. Friends die, marriages end, staircases grow steeper–but we still have that perfect world down there, and we can live in it for a couple of hours at a time. You’d be surprised how much it helps.”

All at once I heard Shirley Horn’s soft, slow, thick-grained voice in my mind’s ear, and sighed. “Ah, Elly, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“Kind of,” she said, putting her unlined hand atop mine and giving it a comforting pat.

On December 6, I’ll be teaming up with Maud Newton (lovingly known around these parts as Supermaud) and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker (whom I’ve never met, weirdly enough) for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is “The Art of Online Criticism.”

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone’s a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

October 2003:

I’m not saying that all good new art has to be simple, or that I only like simple art. Nor am I saying that all great art is destined in time to be swallowed up and spit out by Madison Avenue. But as I grow older, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the long-term viability of self-consciously “difficult” art. This is part of what I meant when I observed a little earlier today that the first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. Of course it is our reciprocal responsibility to be open to the new. What seems strange now may soon come to seem beautiful–but I very much doubt that a lifetime’s puzzling over Finnegans Wake will cause it to seem anything other than pointlessly complex. There’s a reason why the greatest artists dissolve into simplicity as they grow older….

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

– Alec Guinness’ fee in 1976 (plus two percent of the producer’s profit) for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: $150,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $514,978.46

(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)

“In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain.”

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

Today in “Sightings,” my Wall Street Journal column about the arts in America, I write about how blogging is affecting arts journalism:

Sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be true–only with a twist. Most newspapers, for instance, really are devoting less space to the fine arts, but that’s because newspapers themselves are growing smaller and smaller. Relatively speaking, says Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), American newspapers allocate the same percentage of their space to the arts today that they did five years ago. The problem isn’t the slice of the pie but the quality of the filling. Outside of a half-dozen or so major American cities, newspaper arts criticism has always been dismayingly uneven….

How to break these viciously interlocking circles? Since 2004, the NAJP has been running a series of two-week “institutes” for critics and writers from regional newspapers and other publications. I’ve taught at two of these institutes (the most recent of which took place last month in New York City), and though my students have varied widely in experience, they’ve worked impressively hard to strengthen their grasp of the art forms they’d been assigned to cover. I expect all of them to go home and do good things.

That’s one approach. Another is to start a blog, a Web-based journal that can be read by anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. A couple of hundred bloggers now write about the arts on a fairly regular basis. I’ve been following their work since I started my own “artblog,” “About Last Night,” in the summer of 2003, and I believe the same technological revolution that has already transformed political journalism is about to have a similarly galvanizing effect on regional arts journalism….

Read the whole thing here. As was the case with Friday’s drama column, the entire Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to subscribe (which I recommend).

“During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy’s String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy’s death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique, and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred, and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go.”

Paul Hindemith (quoted in Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music)

Time now for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I post excerpts from my reviews of two newly opened Broadway shows, Jersey Boys and Souvenir, and a touring production of The Winter’s Tale that played Brooklyn last week:

Yet another jukebox musical has come to town, and this time I don’t feel like arguing–much. For reasons not obvious to me, “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons” is not only giving pleasure to paying theatergoers (that part I get) but has also passed muster with certain critics who should know better. Contrary to anything you’ve read elsewhere, it’s nothing more than 32 songs performed on a cheap-looking set by a high-priced lounge band, strung together like dimestore pearls on the most vapid of all-tell-no-show books….

No doubt I’m the wrong person to review this show, seeing as how the hyped-up falsetto yelps of Mr. Valli (convincingly simulated here by John Lloyd Young) give me hi-yie-yives. All I can say is that it would be a lot simpler for everyone involved if they’d just move the whole thing to Newark….

If you know who Florence Foster Jenkins was, you know entirely too much about opera and should enter a 12-step program. Everyone else will need an introduction to the woman about whom “Souvenir” was written, so here goes: Jenkins was a wealthy New Yorker who suffered from the gross delusion that she was a great soprano. In fact, she sounded like a tone-deaf donkey who’d snorted helium, but each year she put up the money to give a recital at the Ritz-Carlton whose tickets were snapped up by opera buffs suffering from the equally gross delusion that it was amusing to watch her act like an idiot in public….

Now Stephen Temperley has turned Jenkins (Judy Kaye) into the butt of a two-person play narrated by Cosme McMoon (Donald Corren), her pianist and vocal coach….

Needless to say, the Tony-winning Ms. Kaye really can sing, which is part of the joke, since it isn’t easy to deliberately sing that badly. In fact, Jenkins’ singing wasn’t nearly as funny as Ms. Kaye’s wicked impression of it–but of course you’ll have figured out by now that I thought most of “Souvenir” to be the opposite of funny. Call me a prig, but there seems to me something fundamentally nasty about such sadistic spectator sports….

Edward Hall’s production of “The Winter’s Tale” has come and gone, having played its six scheduled performances at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater. Had it been around even a little longer, I would have tried to see it twice. Propeller, Mr. Hall’s all-male company, is my favorite touring theatrical troupe, a gaggle of magicians whose Shakespeare performances, played on the simplest of pack-it-up-and-hit-the-road sets, are briskly fanciful and endlessly imaginative….

Propeller has two more U.S. stops left before it returns to England. “The Winter’s Tale” is now playing through Sunday at the Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley, Ca., after which it moves to Washington’s Kennedy Center, where it will be seen next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you happen to be anywhere near either of those two cities and can possibly wangle a ticket, start wangling.

To read the whole thing, go here. The Online Journal is free all this week, the idea being that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to subscribe (which I recommend).

P.S. “Sightings,” my biweekly column about the arts in America, will be appearing in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday morning’s Wall Street Journal. Take a look.