Archives for September 2007

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)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 29)

“I talked with Louis Armstrong one night in Basin Street and mentioned his record of ‘When You’re Smilin” which I had early loved and too soon lost. ‘I was working in the house band at the Paramount when I was young,’ Armstrong said. ‘And the lead trumpet stood up and played that song, and I just copied what he did note for note. I never found out his name but there was kicks in him. There’s kicks everywhere.'”
Murray Kempton, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events

• Kevin Kinsella’s interview with Anya Ulinich. I hope to pick up her novel Petropolis this week; you can read the first chapter here.
• Beckett for Babies. (O Aulenback! how I have missed thee.)

This week I’ve been rereading Possession, which is up there with Middlemarch for great novels to read when you’re snarled, low and the sleeves of your cardigan are stuffed with Kleenex (suck it, ragweed season). I’ve been reading Madwoman in the Attic, too, and Byatt’s novel makes a satisfying counterpoint.
The New York Times has a nice page devoted to A.S. Byatt, which includes these tidbits:
• When the book became an unlikely bestseller in the United States, in the winter of 1990, Byatt was asked to speculate on the reason for its popularity. She responded, “It’s like the books people used to enjoy reading when they enjoyed reading … It has a universal plot, a classic romantic plot and a classic detective plot. And the plot was more important than anything else in it. People can get the sort of pleasure out of it they got out of the old romantic novel.”
• In another interview, Byatt described the spark for the novel:

Sometime in the early 1970’s, Ms. Byatt recalled, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar in the British Museum Library and mused that much of what she knew of Coleridge had been filtered through that individual, who had devoted a lifetime to her study of the Romantic poet. ”I thought, it’s almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered – has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?”

• Also worth a read, this lengthy but fascinating interview with Éditions Paradigme. In it, Byatt notes, “I think there are a lot of rather romantic novels rather like Possession that believe themselves to be influenced by Possession and rather depress me,” which made me laugh.
RELATED:
• Byatt’s ode to Middlemarch.

Every now and then I like to check in and see what the English naturalist Gilbert White was noticing this time of year. So many of his journal entries, their language sparing and concise, amount to a sort of accidental poetry. Here are his reports on a stretch of September days in 1777:

Sept. 14. Black cluster-grapes begin to turn color. A tremendous & awful earthquake at Manchester, & the district round. The earthquake happened a little before eleven o’ the clock in the forenoon, when many of the inhabitants were assembled at their respective places of worship.
Sept. 17. The sky this evening, being what they call a mackerel sky, was most beautiful, & much admired in many parts of the country. Footnote. As the beautiful mackerel sky was remarked & admired at Ringmer, near Lewes, London, & Selborne at the same time; it is a plain proof that those fleecy clouds were very high in the atmosphere. These places lie in a triangle whose shortest base is more than 50 miles. Italian skies! Full moon. The creeping fogs in the pastures are very picturesque & amusing [interesting] & represent arms of the sea, rivers, & lakes.
Sept. 18. [Findon] Deep, wet fog. Sweet day.
Sept. 19. [Chilgrove] Ring-ousels on the downs on their autumnal visit. Lapwings about on the downs attended by starlings; few stone-curlews. Sweet Italian skies. The foliage of the beeches remarkably decayed & rusty.
Sept. 20. Some corn abroad: a vast burden of straw, & many ricks.
Sept. 24. The walks begin to be strewed with leaves. Vivid Northern Aurora.

I previously blogged White last August, here.

“Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don’t even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning.”
Adolf Hitler (quoted in Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics)

Last year I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal about how the Atlanta Opera decided to shutter its downtown headquarters and move to the suburbs:

Not surprisingly, arts-savvy Atlantans are divided over whether the move to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre will prove smart or suicidal. Other local arts organizations with a midtown presence, such as the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Symphony, are firmly committed to staying where they are. Can an opera company that relocates to the suburbs maintain its cachet among the cognoscenti? No one knows–yet everyone agrees that the Atlanta Opera, which is $2.85 million in the red, had to do something drastic. Subscriptions have been plummeting, in part because the 4,500-seat civic center where the company now performs is too large for comfortable viewing of normal-size theatrical productions. (The new theater at the Cobb Centre has only 2,750 seats.) “If we stay at the civic center, I don’t know if we can continue to survive,” Dennis Hanthorn, general manager of the Atlanta Opera, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
All politics–including the politics of art–is local, and it’s anything but certain that local operagoers will follow the Atlanta Opera to Cobb County. From a distance, though, the move looks to me to be both adventurous and prescient, especially since most demographers agree that the future of middle-class urban life in America belongs to the suburbs. Rightly or wrongly, the Atlanta Opera is taking a leap into that unpredictable but promising future….
In fact, many American cities are sprawling megalopolises made up of middle-class commuters who don’t care to drive back into midtown on weekends if they can help it. The Atlanta Opera is betting that enough such people will embrace a suburban-based opera company to make its move to Cobb County worthwhile. If I had to choose, I’d make the same bet.

Now the Atlanta Opera is in the news again. In preparation for the move, which takes place later this month. the company conducted a Gallup poll asking its subscribers whether they’d be willing to attend performances in the suburbs. According to the Atlanta Constitution, the answer was yes–so long as there were good restaurants close to the new theater. Another finding was equally striking. As part of its investigation of what made the company’s patrons choose to go to specific performances, the pollsters discovered that “[f]amous opera stars from New York’s Metropolitan Opera–singers of the stature of soprano Deborah Voigt–draw almost no recognition. Nor do singers who performed recently with the Atlanta Opera trigger any memories.”
It will be interesting to see how the company responds to these fascinating findings. Speaking as the librettist of a new opera in the making, I wonder whether it might want to consider teaming up with local restaurants to offer dinner-and-an-opera package deals designed to lure Georgians to its more adventurous bills.
I suggest this in all seriousness, by the way. For those of us who spend our lives immersed in the fine arts, the reults of the Atlanta Opera’s survey should be instructive, not to mention humbling. Nor do they inspire me to condescend to the company’s patrons. The fact is that a decision to go to the opera–or to an orchestral concert, a nightclub, or a museum–is perceived by most people as a choice among competing forms of entertainment, and not all of the factors that enter into it are necessarily simon-pure. Moreover, as every opera administrator knows perfectly well, there aren’t nearly enough fanatical opera buffs in the world, much less in Atlanta, to fill the seats of a theater night after night.
For this reason, it strikes me that arts administrators throughout the country should be conducting similar research into the vexing question of audience motivation. How do you fill an opera house with people who don’t know who Deborah Voigt is–and is it possible to do so without diluting your programming beyond the point of recognition?
As they say down in the land of serious barbecue, there’s the rub.

“The idea of writing ‘for everyone’ flirts with utopianism, but I feel distrust for whoever is a poet for the few, or for himself alone. To write is to transmit; what can you say if the message is coded and no one has the key? You can say that to transmit this particular message, in this specific way, was necessary to the author, but with the rider that it is also useless to the rest of the world.”
Primo Levi, The Need for Roots: A Personal Anthology (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)