Archives for July 2006

I spent much of Thursday driving around the highlands of Boise in my rented car, then made my way to the Boise Art Museum for a sneak peek at Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful, which opens Saturday. As I drove I listened to Twin Falls, the new Deidre Rodman-Steve Swallow CD, and I couldn’t have made a better choice: Rodman comes from Boise, and Twin Falls is a sequence of lyrical duets for acoustic piano and electric bass in which she and Swallow evoke with great subtlety the stony landscapes among which I wandered all afternoon.

Once I got back to the hotel, I turned on my iBook and plugged into the Web, where I ran across a New York Times story about Jack Larson and Noel Neill, who played Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane a half-century ago in the Superman TV series. Not only are they both alive and well, but it seems that Larson, who later wrote the libretti for operas by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Brentwood, California. Charmed by the coincidence, I did a bit of Googling and quickly found a photo of Larson’s home, a gorgeous Usonian built in 1939. (It’s S. 272 in the Wright catalogue, if you’re interested.)

Later on I dined at the Milky Way with Dana Oland, a smart young ex-dancer who covers the arts for the Idaho Statesman. Should you ever find yourself in Boise, I strongly suggest you make a point of eating there, too. After dinner I headed out Warm Springs Avenue to the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, which ends with my favorite curtain line in all of Shakespeare: The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.

Now I’m packing my bag and regretting my imminent departure from Boise, with which I find myself much taken. Tomorrow morning I fly to Salt Lake City, change planes for Saint George, pick up another rental car at the airport, drive to Cedar City, and see three shows at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I wish I could stick around for another day or two, but I can’t. I never can. No sooner do I find my bearings in one town than I’m off to the next one, looking for another aisle seat and another tasty meal. You that way: I this way.

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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

– The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, 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)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

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

CLOSING SOON:

– Faith Healer (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

– Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)

“I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is take the givens of one’s fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable.”

S

“I HAVE a vast deal to say, and shall give all this morning to my pen.

“As to my plan of writing every evening the adventures of the day, I find it impracticable; for the diversions here are so very late, that if I begin my letters after them, I could not go to bed at all.”

That is the opening of one of Evelina’s early letters to her guardian, the Rev. Mr. Villars, in Fanny Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. I find myself much in the same situation trying to blog this week, forced to choose sleep over blogging in the interests of self-preservation. But I have a vast deal to say, and shall give all this evening to my keyboard. So look for updates then.

I arose at four-thirty Wednesday morning in New York City. Twelve hours later I checked into a hotel in Boise, Idaho, having first flown west to Phoenix, Arizona, where I changed planes and headed north. Five hours after that I was sitting down to see the Idaho Shakespeare Festival‘s production of Major Barbara. Now, twenty-one hours after my alarm clock last went off, I’m back in my hotel room, getting ready for bed.

I could complain about the length of my day, as well as certain disagreeable things that happened to me along the way, but I won’t, because I’ve been reading Notes of a Pianist, the newly reprinted travel diaries of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in which America’s first important concert pianist (and one of our most original composers) tells in excruciatingly frank and funny detail what it was like for a musician to go on the road in nineteenth-century America. No, I’m not fond of snatching a hasty breakfast in between flights, but once you learn what it was like to pay an overnight visit to Springfield, Illinois, in 1863, you’re likely to come away with a greatly enhanced appreciation of the Egg McMuffin:

St. Nicholas Hotel (!!!!) Each one of these exclamation points, if it could speak, would tell you a story of tribulations, of all kinds of mortifications that should render the St. Nicholas Hotel, Springfield, forever celebrated! First, the legislature being in session, the house is full, which is the same as saying that the beefsteaks are leathery, the eggs too hard….We are cooped up, six of us, in a little room hardly large enough to hold one bed comfortably. The water to wash with is as black as ink. The proprietor charges us for a supper that we have not eaten, and, upon a timid observation that we make respecting it, looks at us as if he wished to crush us and, addressing the porter, throws out this memorable phrase, which seems to me not to speak very highly in favor of the honesty of the travelers with whom he is in the habit of dealing: “Billy, take care that the trunks are not taken away before the bills are paid!”

In any case, the truth is that I love traveling, even the ordinary parts. I love being whisked through the streets of Manhattan before sunrise. I love gazing out the window of a plane at clouds and deserts and mesas and mountain ranges. Above all, I love to explore a city that’s new to me, then spend the evening watching Shaw or Shakespeare or Lynn Nottage. What could be more fun?

So yes, I had an excellent day–but enough is enough. I get to sleep in tomorrow, after which I’ll be paying a visit to the Boise Art Museum, dining with a local arts journalist, going to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, then flying to Cedar City, Utah, to do the whole thing over again. That being the case, I think I’ll eat an Owyhee Idaho Spud (no, it’s not a potato product) and hit the sack. It’s midnight in Boise, and even a drama critic deserves a good night’s sleep.

Accompanists tend not to get the credit they deserve, especially in the field of pop music. Unless you’re in the business or on its fringes, for instance, you probably won’t recognize the name of Bill Miller, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91. As of this morning, the New York Times hadn’t yet published an obituary of Miller. Nevertheless, you’ve probably heard him play piano, because he spent nearly a half-century, from 1951 to 1995, backing up Frank Sinatra. It was a difficult task that he discharged with supreme tact and taste, steering clear of the spotlight, finding fulfillment in making his boss sound good.

The best evidence of Miller’s gifts is the 1958 performance of “One for My Baby” that closes Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Most of it is a duet for voice and piano, with Nelson Riddle adding discreet touches of orchestral support here and there. It is Sinatra’s greatest recording–and it wouldn’t have been the same without Bill Miller. Listen to it as you bid him farewell.

“Passion has no footing in reason. Passion is indifferent to reciprocal emotion, it needs to express itself to the full, live itself to the very end, no matter if all it receives in return is kind feelings, courtesy, friendship, or mere patience. Every great passion is hopeless, if not it would be no passion at all but some cleverly calculated arrangement, an exchange of lukewarm interests.”

S

I depart very early on Wednesday morning for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, from which I’ll be traveling directly to the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I plan to bring my trusty laptop with me and to blog as often as possible, but I’ll be spending a great deal of time in transit–I’m flying home from Utah by way of Los Angeles, for example–so don’t be surprised if my postings for the rest of the week are a trifle irregular.

The good news, as you may have noticed last week, is that Our Girl is back on the blog and full of stuff to say. No doubt she’ll be filling in some of the empty spaces.

See you in the wild, wild West!