Archives for July 2007

I was traveling today and almost forgot to post the teaser for my biweekly “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. This time around my subject is the drying-up of regional arts criticism. All over the country, newspapers are cutting back on book reviews, laying off classical-music critics, and replacing locally written film reviews with wire-service copy. What’s the problem? Who’s to blame? And what effect–if any–will this apparent sea change in American journalism have on the fine arts?
To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.
UPDATE: Here’s a little taste:

One of the most important civic duties that a newspaper performs is to cover the activities of local arts groups–but it can’t do that effectively without also employing knowledgeable critics who are competent to evaluate the work of those groups. Mere reportage, while essential, is only the first step. It’s not enough to announce that the Hooterville Art Museum finally bought itself a Picasso. You also need a staffer who can tell you whether it’s worth hanging, just as you need someone who knows whether the Hooterville Repertory Company’s production of “Private Lives” was funny for the right reasons.
Can bloggers do that? Of course–and some of them do it better than their print-media counterparts. You won’t find a more thoughtful literary critic than Houston’s Patrick Kurp, a more imaginative commentator on music than San Francisco’s Heather Heise, or a better-informed art writer than Tyler Green of Washington, D.C. But blogging, valuable though it can be, is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately. The problem is that fewer and fewer newspapers seem willing to do that in any consistent way. I don’t care for the word “provincial,” but I can’t think of a more accurate way to describe a city whose local paper is unwilling to make that kind of commitment to the fine arts….

Online Journal subscribers can read the whole thing by going here.

Don’t forget…we have a surprise for you on Monday!
See you then.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on two North Carolina outdoor dramas, The Lost Colony and Unto These Hills:

Not only is North Carolina the undisputed capital of historical outdoor drama, but it’s the home of the oldest such show, Paul Green’s “The Lost Colony,” a freely fictionalized recounting of the saga of the 115 English colonists who sailed to North Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1587, made camp there, and were never seen again. (Virginia Dare, the first child born to English parents in the Western Hemisphere, was one of them.) “The Lost Colony,” which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, is performed at a waterside amphitheater in the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, a park located on the site of the Roanoke colony. Its better-known alumni include Andy Griffith and Steve Kazee, now starring opposite Audra McDonald in the Broadway revival of “110 in the Shade,” and the show remains one of North Carolina’s top tourist attractions….
“The Lost Colony” remains a wonderfully old-fashioned period piece whose unabashed patriotism and frank religiosity are redolent of a long-lost age of certitude. “Paul Green has written history with a compassion that turns his characters into unconscious symbols of a brave new world….Mr. Green’s wisdom is rooted in a poet’s love of a fair land.” So wrote Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of the New York Times, in 1937. I wonder how many critics would feel moved to use such language today….
“Unto These Hills,” America’s third oldest outdoor drama, has been playing since 1950 in a steeply raked, stunningly beautiful rustic amphitheater carved out of the side of one of the Great Smoky Mountains. Cherokee, the tiny tourist town that serves as headquarters of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, has evolved over the years into something resembling an Indian theme park, complete with an outdoor drama, a museum, a replica of an Indian village and (naturally) a casino.
The “Unto These Hills” now being performed in Cherokee’s Mountainside Theatre is not the same show my parents saw and loved a half-century ago. That show, written by Kermit Hunter, a protégé of Paul Green who is briefly dismissed in the program of the current production as “a non-Native,” was a traditional plot-driven outdoor drama about one of the most shameful events in American history, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from North Carolina to Oklahoma by the U.S. military in 1838. The new “Unto These Hills,” unveiled last year and rewritten for this season, jettisoned Hunter’s script in favor of a less downbeat, more historically accurate show in which a pair of Cherokee oldsters tell their grandchildren tales of the past that are acted out by the 75-person cast….

As usual, no free link, so act accordingly. Either buy today’s paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“She owned, as I had put it to her, his heart. She had that and everything else–if she could only believe it. What I had to tell her was that in the whole world there was no one who ever would need his heart, his mind, his hand. It was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man.”
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (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)
• 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)
• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• 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:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, closes July 29)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Romeo and Juliet (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

“He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love.”
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (courtesy of The Rat)

“I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy; although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition….In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best. In any case, to attempt to describe a woman in the broad terms employable for a man is perhaps irrational.”
Anthony Powell, A Buyer’s Market

“The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest.”
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams