Archives for May 2007

I’m in Chicagoland, immersing myself in local theater, architecture, and cuisine. On Saturday I attended the opening-night performance of the Court Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, visited Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the first time, and lunched at Hot Doug’s, where I ate a haute dog called the Edward Vrdolyak that consisted of smoked crayfish and pork sausage, cajun tartar sauce, smoked gouda cheese, and crispy fried onions, all crammed into a bun. How’s that for a day’s work?
This afternoon I’ll be driving out to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse to spend the night. I expect to have much to say about this experience later in the week. In the meantime, permit me to point out that Muirhead Farmhouse is one of five Wright houses available for short-term rental. These are the others:
• Haynes House, Fort Wayne, Indiana
• Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio
• Seth Peterson Cottage, Mirror Lake, Wisconsin
• Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin
In addition, the first Usonian house, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, is available for monthly rental.
I spent the night in two of these houses in 2005, then wrote about them in The Wall Street Journal:

While all 35 of the Wright houses open to the public are worth visiting, no tour can possibly have more than a fraction of the impact of spending the night in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright–and you can do just that….I visited the four-bedroom Schwartz House in Two Rivers and the studio-sized Seth Peterson Cottage in Lake Delton, the latter not far from Taliesin, Wright’s estate and headquarters, where visitors can see his theories of domestic architecture and décor writ large.
To turn the key of a Wright house is to step into a parallel universe. The huge windows, the open, uncluttered floor plans, the straightforward use of such simple materials as wood, brick, concrete and rough-textured masonry: All create the illusion of a vast interior space in close harmony with its natural surroundings. Instead of walls, subtly varied ceiling heights denote the different living areas surrounding the massive fireplace that is the linchpin of every Wright house. This unoppressive openness–both from area to area and between indoors and out–is what makes even a small house like the 880-square-foot Peterson Cottage, which was boarded up for two decades before being rehabilitated in 1992, seem so much larger than it really is.

If you know of any additional Wright houses (or other historically significant modern homes) that are being operated as bed-and-breakfasts or can be rented on a short-term basis, please drop me an e-mail so that I can pass the word.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to head for the hills!
P.S. I listened to Fred Hersch’s new CD in the car last night, but otherwise my experiment in musical self-therapy is temporarily suspended while I’m on the road. I’ll resume regular listening activities on my return to Manhattan.

The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my latest “Sightings” column:

Orion Books, one of England’s top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as “Anna Karenina,” “Moby-Dick” and “Vanity Fair.” The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as “Compact Editions.” “‘David Copperfield’ in Half the Time,” as one entry promises. Malcolm Edwards, the series’ publisher, told a Times of London reporter that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring.”
Not surprisingly, Orion has been taking a beating from British highbrows. “It’s completely ridiculous–a daft idea,” one London bookseller told the Times. “How can you edit the classics?” Daft it may be, but no less a literary light than Somerset Maugham once undertook to prepare abridged versions of the 10 best novels ever written. His choices, which included “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “War and Peace,” were unexceptionable. What kicked up a row was Maugham’s cheeky claim that “the wise reader will get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping….There is nothing reprehensible in cutting.”
I haven’t seen any of Orion’s Compact Editions–they’ll be published in the U.S. starting in August–but I’m not inclined to be snippy about them, because it happens that I grew up reading abridged novels, an experience that did me no harm whatsoever….

To read the whole thing, go here.

“One of the first essentials of creative art is the habit of imagining the most familiar things as vividly as the most surprising.”
Donald Francis Tovey, program note for William Walton’s Viola Concerto

It’s all Broadway, all the time in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I wrap up the 2006-07 season with reviews of 110 in the Shade, Deuce, and Radio Golf:

This has been a big season for Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. First they revived “The Fantasticks,” their best-known musical, in a splendid Off Broadway production directed by Mr. Jones that opened last August and is still going strong. Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has brought “110 in the Shade” back to Broadway for the first time since it closed in 1964–and it turns out to be every bit as good as “The Fantasticks.” Not only is Lonny Price’s staging letter-perfect, but Audra McDonald, who hasn’t appeared in a Broadway musical since 1999, is giving the performance of a lifetime as Lizzie Curry, a plain-Jane gal from Texas who is haunted by the prospect of permanent spinsterhood until a fast-talking con man named Starbuck (Steve Kazee) blows into town and awakens her inner babe….
Ms. McDonald gives the most fully realized performance I’ve seen in a musical this season, not excluding Donna Murphy in “LoveMusik” and Raúl Esparza in “Company.” It goes without saying that she has the best voice on Broadway, but like Kristin Chenoweth, she doesn’t have to sing a note to grab your attention. Ms. McDonald is an actor who sings, not a singer who acts…
Rejoice greatly, stargazers: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes have returned to Broadway to share a stage in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce.” Would that this tale of two retired tennis pros were something other than an ordinary celebrity vehicle, but great acting can ennoble the tritest of scripts, and Mr. McNally’s leading ladies deliver the goods with postage to spare….
August Wilson is back in town–posthumously. “Radio Golf,” the tenth and last installment in Wilson’s “Pittsburgh cycle” of plays about black life in 20th-century America, opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005, seven months before the playwright’s death. It has since been performed by a half-dozen other regional companies. Now it’s arrived on Broadway in a road-honed production directed by Kenny Leon, designed by David Gallo and performed by five first-class actors, three of whom have been with the show since its premiere….
Good drama doesn’t always tell the truth–it doesn’t have to. Great drama, on the other hand, turns a spotlight on the world and forces the viewer to acknowledge the most painful and fundamental facts about human nature. Many of August Wilson’s plays do that, but in “Radio Golf” he settled for the lazy half-answers of the ideologue. While that doesn’t diminish in the least the genuine greatness of a play like “Fences,” I wish he’d gone out on a higher, truer note.

No free link, so get thee to a newsstand, from whence cometh help. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you one-click access to the drama column, plus lots of other arty stuff. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
Next week, Chicago!

You may have heard about Orion Books’ Compact Editions, a new series of condensed classics that went on sale in England this week and will be coming to the United States in August. Not surprisingly, British eggheads are sneering at the thought that anyone would dare to publish abridged versions of David Copperfield or Moby-Dick–but should they? That’s the subject of my next “Sightings” column, which appears in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section to see what I have to say. (I promise to be concise!)

“We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree–otherwise an opera–the one called ‘Lohengrin.’ The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.”
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad