Archives for March 17, 2006

Friday is here, and I’m waxing wroth in my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. Neither Ring of Fire nor Entertaining Mr. Sloane pleased me:

And you thought “Lennon” was lousy! Rarely have I been so comprehensively irked by a Broadway show as I was by the latest entry in the jukebox-musical sweepstakes, “Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Musical Show.” Anyone who loves Cash’s music should stay as far away as possible from this 38-song, two-and-a-half-hour tinselthon, which fills the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with the sour smell of bogusness….

Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” is a black comedy of sexual manners that has lost nothing of its ruthless immediacy in the four decades since its premiere. If anything, Orton’s kinky subject matter is more accessible now than it was in 1965, when the first Broadway production closed after just 13 performances. Like most comedies, all “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” needs to make its effect is to be played absolutely straight. Instead, Scott Ellis, the director, has chosen to play it for laughs, encouraging his cast to give the kind of exaggerated, self-conscious performances against which Orton warned. “Unless it’s real,” he said, “it won’t be funny.” It isn’t–and it’s not….

No link, so kindly shell out your weekly dollar at your neighborhood newsstand to read the whole thing. Alternatively, get ambitious and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with immediate access to the full text of my review, along with plenty of additional art-related coverage (including the Pulitzer-winning film reviews of my eminent colleague Joe Morgenstern, which I recommend wholeheartedly).

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

Where and when did you last hear the New York Philharmonic? If you don’t live in New York City, the answer is most likely, “On an old record.” Like most American orchestras, the Philharmonic, aided and abetted by the American Federation of Musicians, priced itself out of the major-label recording business in the ’70s, and since then has made only occasional appearances on CD. And what about radio? The Philharmonic’s broadcasts used to bring it to every corner of the country. (It was while listening to a Sunday matinee on CBS that many Americans first learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.) But traditional classical radio is well on the way to becoming obsolete. In Kentucky, for instance, only one station airs “The New York Philharmonic This Week,” the orchestra’s long-running series.

Does this mean that the orchestra of Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini is doomed to become a regional ensemble, known primarily to those who attend its Lincoln Center concerts? Not necessarily. You can also hear the Philharmonic on the Web by going to nyphil.org, where the orchestra’s most recent broadcasts are available in streaming audio–but you can only listen to the last program, and you can’t download it to your computer to hear at your leisure….

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

“If you feel like asking me anything about my ‘works’ please do–the less great are probably far more explicit than the great, so it wouldn’t be like asking Mary McCarthy. On the other hand it is often better not to know things. I liked a poem of yours in the Listener some weeks ago–one rather puzzling line, but poets are not to be asked to explain why and how.”

Barbara Pym, letter to Philip Larkin (February 25, 1962)

Broadway: The Golden Age, Rick McKay’s wonderful documentary about the greatest days of the Great White Way, has suddenly become a super-hot public-TV pledge-week item. New York’s WNET showed it last Sunday opposite the season premiere of The Sopranos, and their phone bank went wild. Now they’re planning to show it three more times, on Saturday at ten p.m. and midnight and next Monday at two a.m. (plus two additional showings in April). Other stations have been making the same discovery, and so there’ll be showings of Broadway: The Golden Age all across the country this weekend.

Here’s part of what I wrote about Broadway: The Golden Age in The Wall Street Journal last year:

Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of “Bus Stop”?). You’ll weep–I did–to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks….

For a complete listing of upcoming TV showings of Broadway: The Golden Age, go here.