Archives for October 2006

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I consider the wider implications of the revival of Grease that opens on Broadway in June. The stars of this production will be chosen not by the director or producers, but by the viewers of You’re the One That I Want, an NBC reality-TV series that makes its debut later this season. Yes, it’s a gimmick–but I have a sneaking feeling that when all is said and done, You’re the One That I Want will prove to have been a very significant episode in the history of commercial theater in America.

To find out why, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

– I was interviewed by the BBC last week for Pods and Blogs, a radio series on which I discussed my recent Wall Street Journal column about YouTube and the fine arts. The interview aired on Tuesday. To listen via streaming audio, go here. (If you’re in a hurry, my segment starts roughly forty-four minutes into the hour.)

– Doug Ramsey, a/k/a Mr. Rifftides, reported the other day on a fascinating concert by the Bill Mays Trio (a group I admire without reserve) that blended jazz and classical music to what sounds like brilliant effect. To read what he wrote, go here. I mention it because Doug is now reporting that part of the concert will be broadcast in streaming audio via the Web this coming Sunday at four o’clock Eastern. For further details, go here.

Should the broadcast not fit into your schedule, you can get a taste of the Bill Mays Trio on its own by purchasing this CD. I commend it to your attention.

– A reader reports that Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times recently delivered himself of this one-sentence summary
of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs:

Wotan, the king of the gods, driven by lust and power, makes bad bargains and then is forced by his wife to contend with their consequences, losing control of the world in the process.

That is, if I do say so myself, pretty damn neat. I seem to remember a Comden and Green lyric that dealt no less efficiently with the plots of a number of classic novels, but I’m away from my library this week and so can’t check it out for myself. Can anyone out there oblige me?

– Another reader passes on this quote from the great jazz drummer Art Blakey:

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

No source, alas–I’ve done a bit of surfing to try and track it down, but everyone cites it without identifying the occasion on which Blakey said it. Having spent more than a little bit of my spare time running down alleged remarks by H.L. Mencken that turned out to be apocryphal, I’m reluctant to accept it as authentic without a source. Once again, I’d appreciate a steer in the right direction.

“A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.”

Thornton Wilder, interview, The Paris Review, Winter 1956

Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, a/k/a Jaime J. Weinman, has found and posted a link to a YouTube clip of Little Miss Britten, Dudley Moore’s knowing spoof of a Benjamin Britten folksong arrangement as sung by Peter Pears. (It was part of Beyond the Fringe, the now-legendary 1960 revue written and performed by Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller.) Jaime correctly describes it as “the greatest classical-music parody of all time.” I sent it to an opera coach who plays a lot of Britten, and she promptly wrote back, “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever, ever seen.” I might add that she loves Britten’s music. So do I–and so did Moore, who claimed that he wrote “Little Miss Britten” “out of absolute love and admiration for Britten and with no malice aforethought at all.” Alas, it won’t make any sense unless you know the original, but if you do, you’ll laugh so hard as to run the risk of self-injury.

I love parody and wish in vain that I had a gift for it. As I wrote a couple of years ago, I believe it to be “one of the most powerful and illuminating forms of criticism.” Fortunately, the complete text of the greatest of all literary parodies, Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland, is now available online via Project Gutenberg, and I commend it to your attention.

The best-known of the Christmas Garland parodies is “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” Beerbohm’s lethally exact sendup of H*nry J*m*s’ late style:

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it.

It’s splendidly wicked, but I confess to preferring “P.C., X, 36,” in which R*d**rd K*pl*ng gets his:

I had spent Christmas Eve at the Club, listening to a grand pow-wow between certain of the choicer sons of Adam. Then Slushby had cut in. Slushby is one who writes to newspapers and is theirs obediently “HUMANITARIAN.” When Slushby cuts in, men remember they have to be up early next morning.

For those of you who weren’t reading “About Last Night” back in 2004, here is Hugh Kingsmill’s parody of A.E. Housman, which is equally good–and equally cruel.

(For more about Beyond the Fringe, go here.)

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:

– A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– 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)

– Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

– 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 THIS WEEKEND:

– Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

“The Devil lays eggs in idle palms.”

Julian Jebb (quoted in Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir)

Here are some gems gleaned from my recent voyages into cyberspace:

– Mr. Modern Art Notes holds forth on the genius of Richard Diebenkorn, making an important point in passing:

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a chief curator about a Richard Diebenkorn painting in one of his galleries. “You know,” I said. “It’s remarkable that there’s never been a full, comprehensive Ocean Park survey exhibit.”

The curator paused. “Are you sure about that?” he said, less asking than implying I should double-check Diebenkorn’s exhibition history.

“Completely sure,” I said. “There’s never been a Berkeley show either. It’s bizarre. It’s probably the contemporary art show most in need of being done.”

The curator was still disbelieving, but allowed me my fervor. It’s true. There’s never been a museum (or gallery, for that matter) exhibit surveying the paintings, the drawings, the paintings-on-paper, or the three together….

Or, I might add, the related prints. You won’t find one in the Teachout Museum, alas–I haven’t got that kind of money to throw around–but I am the proud owner of an etching by Diebenkorn, who would be universally acknowledged as one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century had he not made the fatal mistake of living and working in California. Even now, far too many New Yorkers suffer from the wildly mistaken notion that the West Coast is an aesthetic desert. I don’t know where they picked it up–probably from Woody Allen.

– Speaking of the West Coast, Mr. Anecdotal Evidence serves up the best capsule description of Raymond Chandler’s special gifts I’ve read, my own feeble attempts included. Here’s part of it:

Chandler’s literary conscience was bothered by the genre in which he had chosen to work. Part of him wished to write “heavy novels.” We can be grateful he never did, because the hard-boiled detective story enabled him to indulge his strengths, minimize or ignore his weaknesses and create great books that continue to give dependable pleasure to readers. “All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves,” as Marianne Moore once wrote in a very different context….

Read the whole thing. It won’t take long.

– The Little Professor has sailed off the deep end:

It’s official: I share the house with six thousand books…

Alas, I have also exhausted my supply of downstairs walls. (As I live in a Cape Cod, upstairs walls are in somewhat short supply. Or, rather, the upstairs walls are both short and in short supply.) My parents have already suggested building stacks–not to mention another room–but I think that there may be other, more creative, alternatives….

I especially like her idea for “floating, inflatable bookcases,” which reminds me of my favorite line from Mark Helprin’s Memoir from Antproof Case: “I had had wonderful ideas all my life–the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail–but I had never been able to translate them into reality.”

– Why aren’t blogbooks selling? Brenda Coulter, a romance novelist who blogs on the side, offers some sensible observations, accompanied by this amusing aside:

Publishers haven’t been offering big-name bloggers contracts for novels. And rightly so, because wit and erudition on a blog aren’t reliable indicators of talent for fiction-writing….I’m an effusive admirer of Terry Teachout’s writing. But even this fangirl doesn’t assume he’d make a brilliant novelist. For all I know, he’d stink at fiction.

Alas, I would and do, as I confessed in this space two years ago.

– Ms. Light Reading draws a distinction:

In English English clever seems to be a clearer term of praise, for something like what Americans would just call “smart,” but often when I use “clever” it is not a compliment….

Ditto.

– Mr. Jerry Jazz Musician asked a cast of very interesting characters, including Ahmad Jamal, Roger Kellaway, John Pizzarelli, and Nancy Wilson, to name “the five greatest albums (LP or CD) of all time.” The answers he got are–to put it mildly–illuminating.

– By way of Ms. Althouse, here’s Alice Cooper on politics:

“You won’t find any political songs, excepted for

“I was just thinking the other day that I was born in 1939 and so, all my life, people I don’t know have been trying to kill me. The Germans dropped bombs on my house in London and I remember my mother saying: better sleep under the stairs. Then it was the Russians, then the Irish, now another lot of terrorists. I’m starting to accept that I’m a marked man.”

Alan Ayckbourn, interview, The Guardian (Oct. 4, 2006)