Archives for May 4, 2007

…why I haven’t been answering my e-mail lately, it’s not just the spring rush. My mother was in a serious car accident a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been a bit distracted as a result.
The good news is that (A) she’s fine and (B) I’m starting to catch up. You should be hearing from me fairly soon. Meanwhile, hang in there!

The pre-Tony rush is on, and so I’ve reviewed three Broadway openings in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Legally Blonde, LoveMusik, and Coram Boy:

Sure things are rare on Broadway, but absolutely everyone in the business is predicting an endless run for “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” the stage version of Reese Witherspoon’s 2001 screen comedy about a pink-clad, puppy-toting Malibu sorority girl who follows Mr. Wrong to Harvard Law School, where she finds true love and becomes a successful criminal lawyer. Who am I to disagree? I know a megahit when I see one, and “Legally Blonde” has cash written all over it. What’s more, it’s fairly inoffensive as commercial commodities go, so if your tweenage daughter begs you to take her–and she will–give in gracefully. You won’t be bored….
Tune? You want tunes? Go see “LoveMusik,” a jukebox musical about the open marriage of Kurt Weill (Michael Cerveris) and Lotte Lenya (Donna Murphy). Weill was one of the greatest theater composers of the 20th century, and “LoveMusik” contains two dozen of his best songs, some familiar (“Speak Low”) and some not (“I Don’t Love You”). You won’t hear better music on Broadway–or anywhere else, for that matter….
As for Ms. Murphy’s eerily exact impersonation of Lenya, it’s a tour de force comparable in quality to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote. Not only does she get all the surface details right, but she inhabits them so completely that you forget she’s pretending to be someone else–and not even Lenya herself sang “Surabaya Johnny” so well….
If you’ve been hungering for a three-hour-long dose of pretentious silliness, I give you “Coram Boy,” a creepily mawkish tale of two 18th-century orphans that plays like a cross between “Oliver Twist” and “Pride and Prejudice” rewritten by Thomas Harris and accompanied by the music of Handel….

No free link this week. I therefore invite you to go buy a Journal (it’s for sale!), or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the drama column, plus lots of additional art-related coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
P.S. For an alternate view of LoveMusik, go here.

• Read A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker and wrote a six-hundred-word notice for my Contentions book column.
• Lunched at Good Enough to Eat, whose waitresses are as nice as pie.
• Came home to find eight parcels from publicists, one of which contained six gorgeous-looking finished copies of New York Review Books’ new edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, featuring an introduction by me. (It’ll be out June 5–order now!)
• Listened to Leos Janacek’s Concertino, a weird and wonderfully prickly 1925 piece for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, horn, and bassoon.
• Walked across Central Park (first time this year!) to Knoedler & Company, where I saw and reveled in a newly opened show of watercolors by Milton Avery.
• Took a pre-theater nap.
• Went to a Broadway press preview of Terrence McNally’s Deuce.

“There is no more pitiful human illusion than that you can catch up on lost reading in old age. Old age is the busiest of them all. Things you used to do effortlessly take you forever, provided you can do them at all.”
S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary