Archives for 2007

Midder Music is releasing a two-CD set of previously unreleased recordings by my old friend Nancy LaMott on February 12. It’s a sequel of sorts to Live at Tavern on the Green, the 2005 album of performances taped at her last nightclub engagement. (I wrote about that CD here.)
Ask Me Again, the new album, will contain twenty tracks, including “Call Me Irresponsible,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Easy to Love,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” and a Stephen Sondheim medley. I haven’t heard it yet, but I heard Nancy sing most of the songs on Ask Me Again at one time or another, and I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy them now as much as I did then.
In addition to the CD, Midder also plans to release a companion DVD called I’ll Be Here With You: A Collection of Rare Live Performances 1978-1995. Among other things, it will include a version of “Moon River” that Nancy sang on The Charles Grodin Show nine days before her death in 1995.
For more details, go here.

It’s true! It’s true! The Broadway stagehands’ strike has been tentatively settled. Some shows are expected to reopen immediately, but few specific details were available as of late Wednesday night, though it’s generally expected that virtually all shows will be up and running by the weekend.

One show, Chicago, is offering a one-time cut-rate ticket price of $26.50 for Thursday night’s performance, available only at the box office. I’ll update this posting throughout the day with news of any similar offers. (As of noon today, no other shows have announced discounts for tonight’s performances.)

In the meantime, here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. (I like Chicago, too, but I haven’t seen the Broadway production since 2005 and can’t tell you what shape it’s in now.)

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)

• Rock ‘n’ Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, 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, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

• The Glorious Ones (musical, R, extremely bawdy, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

• Things We Want (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

CHICAGO:

• A Park in Our House (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 9, reviewed here)

• What the Butler Saw (comedy, R, extremely adult subject matter, closes Dec. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN NEW YORK:

• Pygmalion * (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, closes Dec. 16, reviewed here)

“The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”
Leon Edel, interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series

• John Updike on wonky dinosaurs. (via Ed.)
• Daniel Engber to Jonah Lehrer: “Proust was not a neuroscientist.” Engber’s article closes with a call for entries for a list of the “all-time worst literary allusions in the history of peer-reviewed science.” The first submission:

“Great writers, from Dante to Joyce, often weave various meanings into their writings.”–Guigo et al. 2006. Unweaving the meanings of messenger RNA sequences. Molecular Cell 23: 150-151.

I’m up early again working on a piece, so I checked our world map of recent visitors and saw that in the past few hours we’ve been viewed in Australia, Botswana, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Grenada, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and Sweden. Not to mention Cincinnati, Cleveland, Iowa City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, Raleigh, Richmond, San Diego, San Antonio, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Tulsa.
Good morning, everybody!

Lately I’ve been dipping in and out of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, Moods. The novel was published in 1864 (four years before the publication of Little Women made Alcott famous), and it’s one of a handful of books that she wrote for an adult audience.
The plot deals with a love triangle, and it seems to be commonly accepted that Alcott modeled the novel’s tomboy heroine after herself, and the two men she’s torn between after Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t why the idea of this love triangle tickles me so, but it does. Infinitely. I only regret there was no sequel in which the heroine, now a contented old married lady, is jarred from her knitting by a knock on the door from Merman Helville, a man of quiet but manly disposition who after decades of sea-voyaging has come home to claim his bride.
The edition I’m reading is a nice one; put out by Rutgers University Press, it contains substantial revisions to the novel made by Alcott years after its initial publication (it was republished in 1882) as well as an early review of Moods written by Henry James. If you’re a writer, I invite you to pause here to imagine what it would be like to have Henry James critique your first novel: To borrow from the language of Moods, an agitated spirit might fill your breast.
I adore Alcott — she’s a great hero of mine, has been since I was a kid (oh Jo!) — so I feel a tinge of disloyalty in finding James’ review wickedly funny. In this excerpt James first supplies some plot synopsis, then takes issue with a type of romantic lead he finds all too common in the work of “lady novelists” (note: the Warwick character is the one based on Thoreau):

The heroine of “Moods” is a fitful, wayward, and withal most amiable young person, named Sylvia. We regret to say that Miss Alcott takes her up in her childhood. We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover. We admit that, even to the middle-aged, Sylvia must have been a most engaging little person. One of her means of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow; under which circumstances she is clandestinely watched by one of the heroes, who then and there falls in love with her.

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“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
José Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”