Archives for October 2007

“He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.”
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

I’m not here, but my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column is. This week I review the Broadway revival of Terrence McNally’s The Ritz and Paper Mill Playhouse’s production of Garry Marshall’s Happy Days: A New Musical:

I love farce, but “The Ritz” is a big, sloppy mess, a series of inconsistently amusing sketches loosely strung on a paper-thin pretext: Gaetano (Kevin Chamberlin) marries into a family of Brooklyn thugs. His brother-in-law Carmine (Lenny Venito) decides to whack him on general principles. In order to avoid becoming a whackee, he jumps in a cab and asks the driver to take him to a place where nobody would dream of looking for him. The driver drops him at the front door of a gay steambath, which Gaetano innocently assumes is an ordinary Turkish bath…and we’re off to the races.
Needless to say, all this is the stuff of a high-speed mistaken-identity farce, and in the hands of a more disciplined farceur it might well have yielded up loads of laughs. The trouble is that Mr. McNally has failed to nail the pieces together with the scrupulous precision that farce demands, meaning that the second act of “The Ritz” fails to build up or pay off with the explosive comic force of such great modern farces as Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw” or Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.” Yes, it’s funny–but not funny enough….
Garry Marshall and Paul Williams have come up with a musical version of “Happy Days,” one of the most successful sitcoms of the ’70s. Perhaps the proper word for this wan production, however, is meta-nostalgic, since it’s a show about a show, a sentimental look back at a sentimental look back at America in the ’50s. That’s an awful lot of sentiment for one musical, especially one that doesn’t contain a single memorable song. All Mr. Williams has to offer is carbon-paper pastiche, just as all Mr. Marshall has to offer is a plot bland enough to have been pinched from an episode of the sitcom he created in 1974, back in the days when most network TV series were as controversial as turkey on white with mayo.

No free link. You know what to do. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

West Side Story just turned 50 years old, and in my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal I hold forth on the virtues–and vices–of one of the most important and influential musicals of the postwar era. (This is not a puff piece.) Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal to see what I have to say.
If you’re a subscriber to the Online Journal, you can read my column after midnight tonight by going here.

“My grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright wore a red sash on his wedding night. That is glamour!”
Anne Baxter (quoted in Time, May 5, 1952)

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)

CLOSING SOON:

• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 28)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• The Dining Room (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 20)

Can even death dry up

These new delighted lakes, conclude

Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

Philip Larkin, “Wedding-Wind”

• I spent last Saturday on the couch reading and bawling over Amy Bloom’s Away. It’s a marvelous novel, as good as the reviews promised. The novel was as psychologically acute as I expect from Bloom — as a writer, she is both so comprehending and tender about the human animal — but the prose seemed more charged than anything I’ve read of hers previously. If you haven’t read it yet I don’t want to ruin the best sections for you, so some incidental flourishes: A woman overheard embarking on a disastrous love affair has a laugh like “the sound of bells on a warhorse”; a man in the act is described as “soft as oatmeal”; a wife complains that her husband’s labors over her during lovemaking were like “a man sawing wood.” What I really want to share is a section that comes late in the book, a meditation on Prosperine in the underworld, that knocked my socks off, but that seems unscrupulous. Like revealing a movie’s best bit in the trailer.
It’s been a while since I bawled over a novel; it’s such an odd thing when it happens. Sure, you expect to cry when Dickens gets an orphan on the slab but otherwise, what provokes it? With Away the leaking started somewhere in the first couple chapters and I just gave myself up to it. The last time a book made me cry was a Kleenex-strewn weekend, late in 2005, which stands out because it was a two-fer of tears, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, after which I looked like a soggy lump with pink-eye. (Or as my friend Hortense would say, “my eyes were puckered tight as a rat’s a**hole.”) With all three of those novels it wasn’t necessarily specific events in the novel that triggered the waterworks, just an underlying tug of sorrow over wasted or lost chances. Middle-aged sadness. (OGIC and TT, any weepers for you?)
Ever since her collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, I’ve envied Bloom’s gift for titles. In that vein Away has some excellent chapter titles, like “I’ve Lost My Youth, Like a Gambler with Bad Cards,” “If I Had Chains, I Would Pull You to Me,” and “Ain’t It Fierce to Be So Beautiful, Beautiful?” Also a great first line: “It is always like this: The best parties are made by people in trouble.”
• On Sunday my husband and I were turned away from a sold-out matinee of Ratatouille at Asheville Pizza, so we went to Malaprop’s instead. I picked up the Best American Essays edited by David Foster Wallace and a copy of Walden, which I read and detested in college but hope to feel more beneficently toward now.
Also being read this week:
• Edith Wharton’s The Reef, Henry James’ favorite of her novels
• Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Metamorphoses

The newly minted Mrs. Teachout and I are spending the next couple of days here en route to here and here. I haven’t tried out my voice yet this morning, but I trust it doesn’t sound quite as bad as it did on Monday.
Tracey Jenkins, the adorable wizardess who designed milady’s engagement ring, has posted some snapshots of the Big Event.
For a prose-only perspective on the proceedings, go here.
See you next week.
P.S. This is the “amazing band” to which Tracey refers in her posting. Also present and performing were Mary Foster Conklin, Julia Dollison, and Kendra Shank.