Archives for August 2006

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains good news (about the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey) and bad news (about Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me). In reverse order:

Make way for the first train wreck of the season. “Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me” is that most embarrassing of disasters, a toothless spoof of a tired subject. It isn’t exactly stop-press news that we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and though I suppose the phenomenon is still absurd enough to be milked for fresh laughs, Mr. Short and his collaborators have none to offer. Instead, they spend a squirm-making, intermission-free hour and a half shooting dead fish in a tiny barrel.

“Fame Becomes Me” is a parody of such confessional shows as “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life” and “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” (“Another curtain goes up/On a one-man show/Another chance for an ego/To say hello”) in which Mr. Short purports to tell his own tale, hotting up the humdrum facts with a gaudy collection of spurious crises. No, he didn’t toot cocaine and humiliate himself on network TV in the middle of the Oscars, then seek absolution at the Betty Ford Clinic. His target is our prurient interest in the famous folk who do such things, but the satirical lance he wields is so blunt that it never draws blood….

Instead of blowing your hard-earned entertainment dollar on “Fame Becomes Me,” why not see something really good? If you live in New York, you won’t have to go very far to catch the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s exuberant production of “The Rivals,” which is comparable in quality to the splendid revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic 1775 comedy that Lincoln Center Theater put on two seasons ago….

No link. Buy a paper, or go here and get smart.

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I consider the case of G

“When I was a child, art seemed like a tunnel to me. At the end of that tunnel I could see light where the world opened up, waiting.”

Jerome Robbins, interview with Robert Kotlowitz (Show, December 1964)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)

– 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)

– 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)

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

CLOSING SOON:

– Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Sept. 2)

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

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

“I used to think that being mad might be rather fun. Inconvenient, of course, and awful, but quite exciting, with visions and things, and thinking the Russians were after you, and doing marvelous paintings. But it isn’t at all really, not my sort anyway. Nothing ever happens. And the other people are such bores. Those first…weeks I suppose they were, it was like being on holiday in a lousy hotel with it raining all the time and you can’t speak the language and let’s say you’ve lost your glasses and can’t read.”

Kingsley Amis, The Anti-Death League

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Around and about the internets (a list prone to updates throughout the day):

– Peter Suderman scratches his head at some critics’ favorable comparison of World Trade Center to United 93:

[Slate Senior Editor Bryan] Curtis sums up his feelings about WTC by saying that, in comparison to United 93, Stone’s movie is simply more “bearable,” and that’s why he could recommend WTC but not United 93.

This strikes me as exactly wrong. That Stone’s movie is bearable is what is most problematic and most disturbing about it. The day that his movie depicts was unbearable, terrible, gut-wrenching–it’s a day that should never be made “bearable” by the tidy formulas of Hollywood. Greengrass’ movie, indeed, was unbearable, a horror to watch. I’m glad I saw it, but I never want to watch it again. But it was the dread that Greengrass conjured, the impossible, sickening futility of 9/11 that made the movie so effective, so powerful, and so utterly right. Stone’s movie, in its lame adherence to convention, trivializes a day that was not and never will be even remotely conventional. There are many words one might use to describe 9/11 or representations of it, but bearable should never be among them.

– Tyler Green notes that Rockefeller Center is set to get its own Anish Kapoor sculpture. It’s pretty, but it’s no bean.

– Lizzie Skurnick, aka the Old Hag, talks poetry writing and reading in an interview at Blue Poppy:

I periodically re-memorize “Leda and the Swan”, “The More Loving One,” and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me…”, because, in my old age, the words do flee from me. Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” I like to recite, especially the first stanza. (“My mother died when I was very young/and my father sold me while yet my tongue” is a great rhyme.) My primary regret is that I was not an English boy born in 1906, forced to memorize reams and reams of poetry while declining Latin verbs. If there is a semi-sadistic teacher with one last Mr. Chips-y semester in him/her, I can pay.

I had a somewhat sadistic fifth-grade public school teacher, actually, who made us memorize everything from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to the Declaration of Independence to “The Highwayman.” He made a little money on the side by selling popsicles after school, but only to the kids who had earned the right to buy one by successfully reciting that day’s passage from memory–weird guy, great experience. A few decades later, I’m still memorizing poetry, and I’ll memorize a good poem for nothing. (My all-time favorite hockey quote was uttered by the late great Red Wing Sid Abel, who once said “We play hockey for money, but we’ll play the Toronto Maple Leafs for nothing.”)

– Girish started it:

There are movies we encounter at certain points in our appreciation for the medium that become, almost by accident, little breakthroughs in our viewing life. They may not be great masterpieces–though they well might–but the important thing is that we have the fortune of meeting up with them at just the right juncture in our development. I think of them as “signpost films”: they take a territory that was previously foggy or unmapped to us and they suddenly make us see and learn something revelatory about this art-form that we love. These encounters make us exclaim, “So, that’s what this movie’s doing!” And it’s a lesson we take with us, carry over and apply, to hundreds of other films we will see in the future.

And now they’re talking about signpost movies at 2 Blowhards too, and other sites as yet undiscovered by me, I’m sure. This question will bear some thought before I can officially submit my own, but a couple of titles spring to mind right away: Jacques Rivette’s C

Maybe someday we can live on the moon

Because we can doesn’t mean we have to

Rockets may come, astronauts go

Nothing so precious as what we don’t know