Archives for February 2006

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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)

– Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, extended through July 9)

– 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 July 2, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)

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

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

The animals that look at us like children

in innocence, in perfect innocence!

The innocence that looks at us! Like children

The animals, the simple animals,

have no idea why legs no longer work.

The animals are little children dying,

brash tigers, household pets–all innocence;

the flames that lit their eyes are also dying,

the animals, the simple animals,

die easily; but hard for us, like work!

Gavin Ewarts, “The Dying Animals”

I was slow to return to the blogosphere after my recent trip to the hospital, but I’ve been accumulating links ever since then and want to share a few of them with you.

– Ms. Pullquote taught Chinatown to her film class the other day:

A show of hands today revealed that only two people in a group of 64 had seen the movie before, so these were virgin eyes. (Oh, to be able to watch this film again for the first time.) And, boy, did some of them have a problem with the ending. One kid even came up afterward to ask if he’d missed something. I had to say no, the bad guys triumphed. Sorry. Today I tried to give them a little context–the Holocaust, and Manson, and Vietnam, and Watergate–but some still felt cheated of their happy ending. They have a lot more disappointment to look forward to….

– Cathy Siepp, who is battling cancer, discovered Ernie Pyle’s wartime journalism not long ago and found it strangely comforting:

Healthy people never really think they’re actually going to die; they have a nagging suspicion that somehow an exception will be made in their case. Then when you get very sick, you have the equally delusional thought that somehow you’re the only person in the world who has to die before your time. Reading “Brave Men” cheered me up enormously, because it brought me back to reality, reading about all these brave men, mostly very young, who died in battle. (The message I got: See? You’re hardly the only one, not at all.) It reminded me of when an old friend of my dad’s came to visit from Winnipeg a couple of years ago, still quite rattled from her turbulent flight. She kept herself calm en route thinking of all the people in her life who’d died already. “If they can do it,” she pointed out briskly, “so can I!”

Speaking as one who now shares
Cathy’s preoccupation, I think it might just be time to revisit Pyle, whom I admire extravagantly. (For a well-chosen online anthology of his dispatches, go here.)

– Mr. House of Mirth shares two of my other preoccupations, both more benign:

The holiday blahs rolled in right on schedule, during the third week in December, and hung on until well after the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done. I took solace from rereading one of my favorite novels, J.F. Powers’s Wheat That Springeth Green, with its pragmatic credo: “As for feeling thwarted and useless,” muses the priestly protagonist, “he knew what it meant. It meant that he was in touch with reality.”

Another solace: hitting the repeat button on the iPod in my coat pocket so I could keep listening to Louis Armstrong’s 1933 version of “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.” At the time I wasn’t struck by the thematic consistency (he’s complaining, I’m complaining). I simply got hooked on this gem from Armstrong’s big band phase in the early Thirties, which used to be the subject of endless bitching from his fans. Sure, the guys in Zilner Randolph’s orchestra couldn’t hold a candle to the rough-and-tumble rapport Armstrong elicited from the Hot Fives and Sevens. Still, you’d have to be deaf to miss the delights of this recording….

To listen to “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” in streaming audio right this second, go here, scroll down, and click on the link. (Incidentally, I wrote about Wheat That Springeth Green in the Teachout Reader.)

– Mr. Jerry Jazz Musician asked a bunch of varied luminaries this question: “What musical recording(s) changed your life?” Here’s my favorite response:

When I was eleven years old, the only music that had reached me deeply, viscerally, at that point, was the often improvised singing by the cantors–the “chazzans,” as they were called–in the Orthodox Jewish synagogue. When I was eleven, I remember walking down one of the main streets of Boston. In those days the record stores had public address systems, and suddenly, out of one of those public address systems, I heard the music that made me shout in pleasure, and Boston boys do not shout in the street–not back then. I rushed back into the store, the name of which I still remember, Krey’s Music Shop, and I asked the clerk what the music was. He told me it was Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare.”…

Guess who said it?

– Julia Dollison, one of this blog’s favorite jazz singers, just got a huge write-up (registration required) in her new local paper, the Sacramento Bee:

Listening to “Observatory,” the wonder is no wonder: Simultaneously light and airy but full-bodied, her voice is rich and dextrous, and she plays with melodies, harmonies, arrangements and nuances of intonation in ways that reinvent standards such as “Night and Day” and “Autumn in New York.”

She recorded the tracks for the album in New York before moving to Sacramento, with a trio that features guitarist Ben Monder, who animates her version of the standard “In a Mellotone” with a ripping solo that might thrill Miles Davis….

If you don’t have Dollison’s debut CD, Observatory, get it.

– Mr. Zayamsbury thinks the way I do:

It’s late. I’m tired. And I’m trying to remember this thing Harlan Ellison said once.

“Every writer’s success is your success.”

I’m a strong advocate for competition in the arts. Lovey-dovey whatever drives me insane. The notion that for some reason everyone’s born with the divine right to be a brilliant artist, that all it takes is someone someday just recognizing that you are a special and unique snowflake makes me a bit ill. “Everyone has a novel inside them.” Bah.

At the same time, when the day is done, when I read something or see something that’s amazing, when the artist just knocks it out of the park, I want to go buy them a drink, give them a hug, and let them talk all night long about how cool it is to complete something that cracks a hole in the world….

– Ms. Pretty Dumb Things is also on my wavelength:

I am a rocker. I can’t say that the mod aesthetic doesn’t appeal to me with its futuristic clean lines and plastic sheen, but at my entropic heart sullenly slumps the bourbon-soaked hirsute tatters of a rocker, and I cherish its bird-flipping defiance.

Which is why I find the fact that the Rolling Stones were chosen as this year’s Superbowl family-safe act disturbing….

– Eye Level, the new (and excellent) blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, offers this trenchant criticism of a lukewarm comment about artblogs by an art dealer:

The qualifier gives it away: “seriously authored by qualified people,” a sentiment totally contrary to the esprit de corps of the blogosphere. What’s in fact great about most blogs is that they are nonseriously authored by nonqualified people. By the best count I’ve read, there are around 400

“The tragical conditions of life imperfectly denoted in The Return of the Native & some other stories of mine I am less & less able to keep out of my work. I often begin a story with the intention of making it brighter & gayer than usual; but the question of conscience soon comes in: & it does not seem right even in novels to wilfully belie one’s own views. All comedy, is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it.”

Thomas Hardy, letter to John Addington Symonds, April 1889

Ever since my untimely visit to the hospital, I’ve been spending an hour each day at the neighborhood gym, most of it pulling vigorously on the handle of a rowing machine. Inspired though I am by the passionate desire not to die just yet, I find virtually all heart-healthy activities to be brain-numbingly tedious. Enter my trusty iPod, which now contains 2,893 songs, many of which are suitable for exercise-related purposes. Instead of letting it play at random, I’ve drawn up a series of playlists of songs to which I listen avidly while tugging away at that damn handle. Each list consists of a dozen or so items, chosen for their brisk tempos and plucked from my computer in strict alphabetical order.

This is List No. 1:

– Count Basie, “9:20 Special” (with Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone)

– Del McCoury, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”

– Fats Waller, “Ain’t Misbehavin'” (from the soundtrack of Stormy Weather, with Benny Carter on trumpet and Zutty Singleton on drums)

– Jim and Jesse, “Air Mail Special” (the bluegrass version, not the jazz version)

– Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”

– Vassar Clements, “Avalanche” (from Will the Circle Be Unbroken)

– Fats Waller, “Baby Brown”

– The Beatles, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

– Louis Armstrong, “Beau Koo Jack” (with Earl Hines on piano)

– Blue

I came home from the gym one day last week to find that my houseguest, a woman with good taste and a sharp eye, had rehung several pieces in the Teachout Museum. We’d talked about it a few days before, so it didn’t come as a total surprise, but I was still startled to find Degas’ Dancer Putting on Her Shoe on the north wall of my living room (directly beneath Neil Welliver’s Night Scene), Vuillard’s Petites etudes dans le square next to the bathroom door (directly beneath Jane Freilicher’s Late Afternoon, Southampton), and Hans Hofmann’s Woman’s Head in place of the clock that used to hang over the door to my kitchen (it now hangs over my stove).

Like most art collectors, I spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over what to put where, and I tend to leave things in place once I decide where they “belong.” It had been at least six months since I’d hung anything new, and longer still since I’d moved any of the pieces I already owned. Because of this, I’d forgotten the emotional effect of moving a familiar piece of art, which is not unlike moistening your index finger and inserting it in an electrical outlet: first you’re horrified, then you’re thrilled. Moving just one piece makes the whole room look different, and moving several pieces can freshen an entire collection–if you move them to the right places. Fortunately, my guest hit the bull’s-eye three times in a row. The only catch was that I had to straighten up the living room at once in order to properly appreciate her handiwork, but no sooner was I done than I sat down on the couch and spent ten ecstatic minutes doing nothing but looking at the walls.

Several days have gone by, yet I still feel a buzz whenever I open the front door and step into the living room. It’s as if I’d bought three brand-new pieces of art. “A change in the weather,” Proust wrote in The Guermantes Way, “is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” That’s what my guest did: she changed the weather inside my apartment, and now I’m basking under a new sun in the sky.

I am pure loneliness

I am empty air

I am drifting cloud.

I am a diminishing star

Speeding away

Out of the universe.

Kathleen Raines, “The Unloved”

It’s a safe bet you’ll soon be hearing about Dominic Smith, whose first novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre appears this month. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has a story forthcoming in the Atlantic, and he’s good. Mercury Visions could have been a greatish novel–Smith has the chops–although I think it would be nice to exempt one or two historical figures from having novels written about them–if there’s still time.

Sadly, the novel’s not great or even in that general vicinity, and I reveal why in this week’s Baltimore Sun book section.

Here’s a snippet.

Daguerre’s work, like the historical backdrop to his life, is enormously suggestive fodder for a novelist’s imagination. His impassioned preoccupation with natural light and its visual and emotional effects formed a natural bridge between art and science, and his career lends itself equally well to explorations of the intuitive, uneven processes of artistic creation and scientific discovery. A short way into his brash debut novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, Dominic Smith evocatively posits a formative moment in Daguerre’s fascination with light and its yet-untapped powers. At 12, Louis presses his eye to a tear in a curtain:

“The sun was going down behind the grain fields, and as it descended, it shot an orange glow from behind the hedgerows and poplars. Louis held the piece of white linen in front of the small curtain hole and saw, projected on it, the shimmering image of the lone walnut tree that stood by the stone fence. … The compression of light through the small hole had borne along the image of the walnut tree, projecting it onto the ceiling. Nature could sketch herself.”

In Smith’s vision of the formation of an artist’s imagination, witnessing light’s power to fix an image lashes together nature, art and technology in Louis’ impressionable mind. And, because in the same scene the boy has fallen for Isobel, the young servant girl tending him, love enters into this web of associations as well – he “fell in love with light and women on the same day.”

This too-tidy coincidence makes for a lovely little chapter, but it’s also the seedling of the ultimate failure of Smith’s nonetheless accomplished and impressive novel.

It’s a disappointing debut, but I’d be surprised if Smith doesn’t have better novels up his sleeve. Guy can write.