Archives for July 13, 2007

You win some, you lose some. In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on Xanadu and Fables de La Fontaine:

Prior to this week my list of contenders for the title of Worst Musical I’ve Ever Reviewed consisted of “In My Life,” “Lestat,” “Lennon,” “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Ring of Fire,” in that order.
Then came “Xanadu.”
What’s so uniquely awful about this stage version of the 1980 flop that put an end to Olivia Newton-John’s Hollywood career? Start with the fact that it’s an elephantine spoof of a quarter-century-old movie so terrible that few people saw it and fewer still remember it. That strikes me as a pretty good working definition of pointlessness, not to mention a near-infallible recipe for boredom. Why bother making such elaborate fun of a forgotten film about a dopey freelance artist (Cheyenne Jackson) who is visited by a Greek muse (Kerry Butler) who inspires him to open a roller disco? Pure spoofery cloys quickly even when its target is familiar, and “Xanadu” has nothing else to offer….
The curtain went up an hour late on “Fables de La Fontaine,” the first production of Lincoln Center Festival 2007. (A malfunctioning light board was to blame.) Fortunately, the show was more than worth the wait. Robert Wilson, whose slow-motion surrealism put him on the avant-garde map in the ’70s, has collaborated with the Comédie-Française, Europe’s oldest theater company, on a pantomime-based French-language version of 19 of Jean de La Fontaine’s 17th-century animal fables. The result is a work of uncanny beauty and compulsion, one of the most entrancing spectacles ever to be presented on a New York stage….

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Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of “About Last Night.” This was the first post, and this was the first almanac entry:

We must find out what we can about this place we’re living in–this place in time–but we’ve got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We’re finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.

Orson Welles said it, and I continue to believe it four years later. Most of our almanac entries are not intended as credos, but this one definitely qualifies.
Much has happened since 2003, both on this blog and elsewhere in the world, but the fact that “About Last Night” has been published continuously throughout that time–even during a week-long stretch when I thought I might be going out of business permanently–says something about the extent to which artblogging has become part of the landscape of American culture. To be sure, skeptics still abound, but I don’t know anybody who actually reads artblogs who doubts that they’re one of the best things to have happened to the arts in recent years. I’m very proud to be a part of the blogosphere.
To Our Girl in Chicago, my friend and co-blogger, and Carrie Frye, our friend and guest blogger–as well as the many artbloggers whom I’ve met and befriended since 2003–I offer heartfelt thanks for helping to create an online world where the arts are taken seriously. And to all of you who read “About Last Night,” thanks for sticking around. In case you’re wondering, we’re still having fun.
See you Monday!

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On,’ has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.”
Calvin Coolidge, broadside distributed to agents of the New York Life Insurance Company (1932).