Archives for April 19, 2007

It seems I was a day ahead of the news….

First Pat Buckley, now Kitty Carlisle Hart: the old order passeth, which makes me feel more than usually middle-aged.

As a child I watched Kitty Carlisle on To Tell the Truth, the classic game show that introduced me to the word “affidavit,” and a little later I saw A Night at the Opera for the first time and was amazed to find that the distinguished and amusing lady who sat on a TV panel every afternoon had once been a movie star of sorts. Later on I played Beverly Carlton in a college production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and discovered to my further amazement that she was the widow of its co-author, Moss Hart.

It hardly seemed possible that such a self-evidently historic person as Kitty Carlisle Hart (as she now styled herself) should still be alive when I finally made it to New York twenty-two years ago, but she sure enough was, having outlived her far more famous husband to become one of the last surviving relics of an age in which I would have preferred to live. What’s more, she kept on ticking all the way to the end, appearing in cabaret and constantly popping up on the town.

I never met the Widow Hart, but I did sit behind her two years ago at a matinée performance of the grisly Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie that starred Jessica Lange and Christian Slater. After intermission I saw her seatmate-companion fumbling with the assisted-listening device that Mrs. Hart had been using to hear the actors. Clearly she’d been having trouble getting it to work. Having recently watched Broadway: The Golden Age, the thought occurred to me that she had most likely seen Laurette Taylor in the original production, and I briefly thought of tapping her on the shoulder and saying, “Don’t bother–you’re not missing anything.” Alas, I didn’t have the nerve, and so missed an opportunity to amuse a legend.

The New York Times obituary of Kitty Carlisle Hart is here. For a lovely tribute by Stephen Holden, the Times‘ smartest critic, go here. The Times also ran a nice little piece today about Pat Buckley’s place in Manhattan’s “nouvelle society,” which you can read by going here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows 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)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

“I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance