Archives for June 2007

“In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases–probably recollections from more tender years of schooling–as ‘his style is simple’ or ‘his style is clear and simple’ or ‘his style is beautiful and simple’ or ‘his style is quite beautiful and simple.’ But remember that ‘simplicity’ is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (courtesy of The Rat)

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)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, extended through July 29)
• 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 SUNDAY:
• A Moon for the Misbegotten * (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 10)

“Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.”
Doris Lessing, Going Home

“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes

Terry reports that his computer has blown a gasket and his access to email for the next week will be intermittent if at all. Please plan accordingly.
For my part, I am slouching back toward blogging and will resume being part of the scenery around here presently.

I depart this morning for a long-overdue visit to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I plan to hang out with my family and do as little as possible.
I don’t plan to blog from home. I’m overblogged, which feels not unlike being overcaffeinated. Except for the daily almanac entry and the usual weekly theater-related posts, you won’t be hearing from me again until next Tuesday.
Later.

Today is the publication date of New York Review Books’ new paperback edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, which features an introduction by me. I showed it to Maud Newton shortly after she wrote it, and she asked if she could post it on her blog, to which I assented happily. To read what I wrote about Dundy and her wonderful book, go here.
Kate Bolick recently interviewed Dundy for the Boston Globe. Go here to see what they had to say.

• In America, only pretty young women become movie stars. Middle-aged male actors who are unattractive–or at least Bogart-ugly–can and do play romantic leads, but no actress who is much short of beautiful or much older than thirty has much chance of seeing her name above the title of a big-budget movie, save as part of a package deal. This harsh reality is, of course, a flagrant and fundamental contradiction of all that the members of the film industry hold most politically dear. I sometimes wonder whether one of the reasons why Hollywood is so liberal might be that its male inhabitants are secretly ashamed of the sexual double standard by which they live. They will sign any petition, contribute lavishly to any sympathetic-sounding candidate, perform any act of political penance–anything, in fact, but sleep with an ordinary-looking woman of a certain age, much less cast her as the love interest in a major motion picture.

• Speaking of double standards, I’ve been reading The Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir by Alan Lomax, the white musicologist who spent a half-century touring the Deep South making field recordings of black blues singers. Lomax truly loved the blues, but there was more to it than that, as he acknowledged in his book:

I strolled along, wrapped in my envelope of Anglo-Saxon shyness and superiority. We had grabbed off everything, I thought, we owned it all–money, land, factories, shiny cars, nice houses–yet these people, confined to their shacks and their slums, really possessed America; they alone, of the pioneers who cleared the land, had learned how to enjoy themselves in this big, lonesome continent; they were the only full-blown Americans.

Somehow I doubt it ever occurred to Lomax–who was, as it happens, a Communist fellow traveler–that his self-flagellating praise of the joys of working-class black life was at bottom every bit as condescending as the happy-darkies stereotypes he held in such deserved contempt.