Archives for July 2007

My latest Wall Street Journal drama column is another report from the road, this time on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s As You Like It and Barrington Stage Company’s revival of Black Comedy. Both shows are nifty:

Summer Shakespeare festivals are thick on the ground in America these days, and more than a few of them are a pleasure to behold. If you’re searching for the best of all possible times, though, you’ll have trouble topping the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I see a lot of Shakespeare, but I can’t think of another outdoor festival that has a higher overall batting average. Hudson Valley’s deliberately informal productions are a model of cultural populism at its most engaging and effective, and Kurt Rhoads’ uproariously loony staging of “As You Like It,” performed in the shoot-’em-up style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western, is one of the cleverest updatings of the Bard to have come my way….
The brightest star of the show is Joey Parsons, the fascinating Ariel of Terrence O’Brien’s 2005 “Tempest,” who is no less striking this time around as Mr. Rhoads’ Rosalind. Decked out in tight jeans and a red cowboy hat à la Annie Oakley, she plays the ardent lover-in-disguise of “As You Like It” with an eager, sexy zest that put me in mind of the young Annette Bening….
Peter Shaffer is better known for such bristlingly serious plays as “Amadeus” and “Equus,” but with “Black Comedy,” first seen on Broadway in 1967, he proved himself to be no less adept at strewing the stage with banana peels. It’s a standard-issue British comedy about a poverty-stricken ultra-modern sculptor (Brian Avers) who’s juggling two unsuspecting ladies (Ginifer King and Nell Mooney), enhanced by one brilliant twist. The action takes place during a power failure–and the onstage lighting is reversed. When the lights are on, the stage is black. When the lights are off, we see the actors lurching around in the “dark.” Add a priceless porcelain sculpture of Buddha and a strategically positioned trap door, and the result is collective hysteria….

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“When the aspiration and exclusiveness of high art were countered with the vigour and craft of entertainment, then the pretensions of the one and the sentimentality of the other were both under mutual surveillance, and it was somewhere there, in the middle of this collision that you were likely to find a healthy–a Shakespearean–kind of theatre.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

I was pleased to be asked by Carrie to file this week’s installment of 5×5. But when I thought back to what I’ve been reading this summer, I realized that it has consisted solely of comfort reading, which in my case typically means: series. So there’s no really new news here for regular readers of this blog, who already know of my guilty affection for MacDonald, the flirtation with Powell that’s recently been upgraded to an actual involvement, and my longstanding crush on Fisher.
But in a world rife with readers (like CAAF her very self!) who are facing the end of the Harry Potter series with a lead sinker in their gut growing weightier as they advance through the seventh volume–maybe the time is right to revisit some of the series and sets of books that I rely on to patch me through spells of readerly indecision. Of all these I can say that it soothes me to know they’re at hand and it buoys me to know there’s plenty of them. Maybe some of them will provide a next harbor for some of you soon-to-be Potter refugees out there.
1. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (link is to the first volume). Twelve novels in four volumes following the life and times of an Englishman following World War I. Powell writes in an apparently meandering fashion behind which lurks–I’m certain it’s there though I don’t, after reading two of the novels, quite yet discern it–a masterful design. The novels are quietly infectious, with truly great (though seldom conspicuous or showy) insights and feats of writing strewn about liberally to be stumbled over like half-buried treasure. Rarely have I felt so ravished and so comforted at the same time.
2. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald (link is to the first book in the series). Residing at the opposite end of the world from #1, these crime novels have not a subtle bone in their sizable body. Their charms lie wholly elsewhere. Belonging to the series does a lot for the individual books, somehow; they gain appeal and impact when read in quantity, filling in at length–detail by detail, stratum by substratum, hustler by con man, felony by misdemeanor–a lurid panorama of southern Florida from the 1960s to 1980s. Pure buttered popcorn.
3. Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill (link is to the first book in the series). I just tonight finished what must have been about my tenth of these smart, wonderfully written English mysteries, On Beulah Height. While nearing the end and thus the whodunit, I remembered again how little of my affinity for Hill’s mysteries has to do with their, er, mysteries. His plots are always clever and sometimes deft but, it seems to me, tend to turn the screw a time or two too many, so that by the end I don’t much even care who did. No matter; the characters are glorious and so is the writing. Not that I’m one to sniff at genre fiction–couldn’t be further from the truth–but how often does one turn to genre fiction for the writing? Not sodding often, as Dalziel might say.
4. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. But you really want these separate editions of the five books collected here: The Gastronomical Me, Serve It Forth, An Alphabet for Gourmets, How to Cook a Wolf, and Consider the Oyster. They’re lovely, and she is gorgeous in the pictures on their jackets. Long ago, I defended Fisher from charges of preciosity here.
5. The Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott (link is to their namesake). Rejoice: you’ll never get through them all! Just kidding, sort of. The best of them (The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian) are terrific, but others have defied my best efforts to get up a head of steam for them. it’s true. Outside English departments, though, who reads Scott anymore? Consider this a gentle reminder that the man arguably had about as great an influence on the history of the novel, and not only in English, as anyone else you can think of. And–you’ll never get through them all!
By the way, I’ve never read a Harry Potter book myself. It was, in fact, only ten days ago that I saw my first Harry Potter movie–which I much enjoyed, thanks in no small part to the whispered running tutorial of my better-versed companion. He, incidentally, finds himself in a bit of a conundrum on the occasion of the last book’s appearance: he has followed the movies devotedly but not read the books, and wishes to know what happens sometime ahead of 2009, or however long it will take the sixth and seventh installments to reach the screen–and presumably wishes not to find out by overhearing a conversation on the elevated train. Should he start with the 6th book, picking up where the movies currently leave off? Skip straight to the 7th? Friendly advice may be sent in care of ogic@artsjournal.com.

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)

• 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 SOON:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

• 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)

CLOSING SUNDAY:

• Gypsy (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)

“To be an actor is to make a brother of paranoia.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

A reader writes, apropos of my posting about Alan Gilbert:

Regarding your comments about Alan Gilbert and classic music: I truly think that the classical music age gap is a symptom of the increasing “juvenilization” of our culture. Young people no longer want to grow up, expand their horizons, and become sophisticated. They no longer “graduate” from rock-and-roll to classical music, just as they don’t graduate from collecting Star Wars memorabilia to collecting fine etchings and engravings. (Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, or Cary Grant dressing up as Darth Vader to attend a Star Wars convention?!?!?! And can you picture Irene Dunne, Ingrid Bergman, or Hedy Lamarr in costumes to match them?)

I have mixed feelings about this e-mail. Mind you, I think there’s a considerable amount of truth in it–I don’t have much use for the sort of “grown” man who wears a reversed baseball cap. But I also think it’s important not to take the process of cultural maturation for granted. Yes, Mozart is an incomparably great composer, but merely being exposed to his music does not (alas) ensure immediate recognition and acceptance of its greatness, least of all when the exposer makes it clear that he expects the exposee to like what he’s hearing on pain of being dismissed as stupid. This is part of what I have in mind when I speak of the “entitlement mentality” that has long prevented our high-culture institutions from coming to grips with the urgent problem of audience development. Would that it weren’t necessary to sell Mozart, but it is, and Alan Gilbert will have to do so if he wants to succeed at the New York Philharmonic.
I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that pop culture is ever and always inferior to high culture. Lest we forget, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant were Hollywood stars, not graduates of RADA. If any of them ever got around to playing Hamlet, the fact has hitherto escaped my attention–and I don’t have a problem with that. By the same token, I don’t think it necessary to “graduate” from rock to classical music (or, for that matter, jazz) in order to become a full-fledged grownup. One can like both, and take both seriously.
As I wrote a few weeks ago:

I yield to no one in my disdain for the spoiled fruits of modernity, but I’ve been listening to rock for 40 years without any obvious ill effects–and with no diminishment of my appreciation for what Alec Wilder referred to as “the professional tradition” in American songwriting….
I love the great pre-rock songwriters with all my heart, and I’ve never had much use for hip-hop or grunge, either. But their work, wonderful though it was, is neither the beginning nor the end of American popular music, and to suppose otherwise is to sentence yourself to the same aesthetic prison that Evelyn Waugh inhabited. “His strongest tastes were negative,” Waugh wrote of himself (more or less) in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. “He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz–everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.” To be disgusted and bored with the world as it is may be an appropriate response to things as they are, but it isn’t much fun, nor is it a good way to get anything done.

No, I don’t collect Star Wars memorabilia, but I do have a Tom & Jerry cel set-up hanging on my wall, I watch WKRP in Cincinnati reruns, and I’m totally into Erin McKeown. And I am such a highbrow–not to mention an adult.
If I may quote myself again:

I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.
The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

I’ll stand by that.
UPDATE: A younger reader writes:

Most of the young people I know desperately wish to “expand their horizons and become sophisticated,” but they have no idea how to go about it. And they’re not getting much guidance from the wider culture, alas.
The real problem with the national cutback of arts coverage–not just in newspapers but throughout the public sphere, including education–is that it cuts today’s young people off from a genuine appreciation of arts, music, drama, dance, cinema, &c. I get the sense that it wasn’t always thus, that in the old days there were a number of extremely wealthy capitalists–like Duncan Phillips, for instance–who possessed genuine connoisseurship and shared their love of the arts with the public at large.
I suspect that the one great public service the arts provide is to remind us that there’s more to living well than money and politics. Perhaps that’s the reason the arts are so neglected today.

The important thing about the middlebrow moment of which I have written so frequently in this space and elsewhere was that it provided just such guidance to anyone who wanted it. I did, and I grabbed it with both hands. I hope Alan Gilbert proves to be a first-rate conductor, but I’m more interested in seeing whether he understands that he needs to be supplying that kind of guidance, not just from time to time but on a regular, week-to-week basis.

I wish:
• I could play piano like Count Basie. (Nat Cole would do.)
• I could cook the fishcakes I ate here last Saturday.
• Patience came more naturally to me.
• I were funnier.
• I had a deeper voice. (My all-time favorite speaking voice, by the way, is that of James Mason.)
• I could read Proust in the original.
• I’d met Paul Desmond.
• I owned this. (Fat chance, alas, though I tried.)
• I weren’t so clumsy.
• OGIC and CAAF lived on my block.

“In one’s twenties it is difficult to grasp the pointlessness of envy.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir