Archives for February 2008

Over at McSweeney’s, great authors predict the outcome of the Super Bowl. The conceit’s solid, and there’s a good Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish joke in there, but the parody of Jane Austen is irritatingly off:

Hyacinth and amethyst adorned the landscape of her heart, betrothed to fragrant oakmoss and blazing scarlet within the amorous lovestrokes of an incandescent horizon. In the shade of the gray branches, she put pen to paper. “I love you, Tom Brady,” it began. “Though others call you wicked.”
Prediction: Handsome Tom 46, Stern Aunt Louisa 9

So much wrong, including that Austen would have been Giants all the way.
I missed last night’s installment of PBS’s Complete Jane Austen, Miss Austen Regrets due to the Super Bowl. The game was exhilarating but, unlike the Austen, could boast only one neat costume: Belicheck’s fancy red sweatshirt. Did anyone see it (the Jane Austen, not the Super Bowl)? I admit as the series continues week after week what I’ve become most interested in is the cleavage of the actresses, which — not to be vulgar or prudish, but strictly anatomical — are undergoing some extraordinary effects that underwire alone can’t explain. In Mansfield Park, poor “plain” Fanny and her cousin Maria had the most opulent displays of decolletage to appear on my TV screen since Madonna stopped by the Golden Globes after giving birth to Lourdes. And then, if I remember right, Jennifer Ehle’s bosom in the Colin Firth edition of Pride and Prejudice, which begins re-airing this next Sunday, is located about four inches north of where you might expect it to be. It’s all so mysterious.

Buried in this Financial Times profile of critic James Wood is some interesting backstage stuff about the New Yorker‘s editing process:

At The New Yorker, whose sacerdotal approach to editing and mania for accuracy were derided in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe for leaving readers lost in “whichy thickets”, Wood has now found himself at the fastidious end of the publishing scale, which on the whole is a good thing. As with The New Republic, the editing process is one where he is constantly being asked to go deeper. “I find it isn’t the editors who put that qualification in,” he says, “it’s the fact-checkers. They have to be resisted, because they want to water down unprovable assertions. So you say: ‘There is great disagreement about Cormac McCarthy’s status’ – this was a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when No Country For Old Men came out – and they’ll say to you: ‘Well, I’ve been on the internet and I haven’t found much disagreement actually.’ So you say: ‘Well, for instance, Ian McEwan thinks he’s complete shit.’ ‘Yeah, but we’ll have to say then there’s been “some” disagreement.’ And already it’s getting wimpish.”
His only other peeve is the way the magazine treats the semi-colon. “The New Yorker will try as often as possible to change it into a colon,” he says – ascribing it to an attempt to mimic English properness. “I love semi-colons,” he says with all the enthusiasm of a 10-year-old talking about chocolate.

Otherwise the profile reveals little you didn’t already know or suspect, forcing one to conclude that the lives of amiable, bookish men devoted to their families and the life of the mind don’t make for the most colorful copy. I was thinking it was a shame the reporter couldn’t borrow biographical details from actor James Woods’s life to punch things up — The critic was dismayed when he arrived at the Guardian one morning to find a disfigured doll had been left on his desk. — but the colon/semi-colon skirmishes will have to do. (Via.)

Paul Moravec and I spent much of the past month slaving away at The Letter, our operatic version of Somerset Maugham’s play. He’s currently in Princeton, I in New York, so we’ve been collaborating via phone and e-mail, a process made infinitely easier by the fact that Paul writes his music on a computer, using a program called Sibelius. Every day or two he e-mails me an updated Sibelius file containing the latest revised version of the scene on which he’s working. This allows me to read through the piano score on the screen of my MacBook while simultaneously listening to a synthesized playback. I go over the score measure by measure, edit the text as needed, and send my edited version back to him, along with any musical suggestions that may have occurred to me.
Most of my suggestions have to do with matters of accentuation and timing. The first is a purely technical matter: on which syllables of the text should the musical stress fall in a given phrase? This is especially important since The Letter will be sung in English. Ideally, we’d like for every word of the text to be immediately intelligible to the members of the audience, so that they won’t have to look away from the stage to read the supertitles. One way to help bring this about is to make the accentuation of each phrase as natural-sounding as possible.
This is rarely a problem for Paul–he was an Episcopal chorister as a boy and has been writing vocal music for most of his life–but it always helps to have another pair of ears checking you out. Sometimes my comments are quite detailed: “‘Really, Leslie’ is not a question but a sarcastic statement. (Imagine Joyce shaking his head contemptuously as he says it.) It needs a strong emphasis on the first syllable of ‘Real-ly,’ and the pitches should go straight down from there, not back up.”
As for timing, I’ve spent two or three nights each week sitting in an aisle seat watching plays for the past five years, which has given me a pretty reliable sense of how long it takes an actor to move from point A to point D while hanging up his coat on the way. Paul doesn’t have that kind of nuts-and-bolts experience, so he trusts me when I tell him that he hasn’t composed enough music to cover a particular piece of stage action.
We spent a fair amount of time, for example, tinkering with the timing of the climactic moment in Scene 4 when Leslie Crosbie (the character played by Bette Davis in the 1940 film version of The Letter) shoots Geoff Hammond, her faithless lover.
Here’s how the scene in question reads in my version:

HAMMOND starts to leave.
LESLIE If you leave me now, I’ll kill myself.
She crosses to the sideboard, pulls open a drawer, and takes out a revolver. HAMMOND opens the front door.
HAMMOND (not looking back) Then kill yourself and be damned.
Without warning, LESLIE shoots him twice.
Leslie, Leslie, what have you done?
He staggers and falls onto the veranda. She runs to the body and fires four more times, then pulls the trigger of the now-empty gun repeatedly. It falls from her hand.

On paper that looks simple enough, and it wouldn’t take an experienced director long to stage it–but every move in an opera is accompanied by music, which means that Paul has to stage the scene in his head while writing the music in order to get the timing right. This led to a whole flurry of e-mails from me, most of which read more or less like this: “Measure 390: Give Geoff a little more time to stagger and collapse here–I’d stretch the measure, change that eighth-note triplet to a quarter-note triplet, and maybe add a couple more counts to measure 391 as well.”
My impression is that most librettists don’t get so closely involved in the compositional process, but then most librettists aren’t trained musicians, meaning that they can’t read a score and comment on it other than in the most general terms. I am, can, and do. By the same token, Paul feels equally free to alter my text in the heat of composition, usually by tightening it up. As soon as you start setting a piece of dramatic writing to music, you realize that certain words and phrases are no longer necessary–the music makes them superfluous–and so you cut or shorten them as needed.
On occasion, though, I also have to write extra “dialogue” for Paul when he feels that a particular moment in the opera requires a bit more music than I’ve allowed for in the libretto. Usually he simply goes ahead and writes the music and I fit words to it after the fact, but every once in a while he calls me up and asks for an extra line or two, as he did a few days ago.
“Look at measures 267 and 268 of Scene 2,” he said. “There’s no vocal line yet, but I want Leslie to sing something there over the orchestra, right after her husband sings I’m not clever,/I’m not handsome,/Whatever did you see in me? Can you give me a couple of lines?”
Leslie’s next line was My dearest, my darling,/I have always loved you, so I scratched my head for a moment and thought about the situation.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Have her sing How can you ask this?/How can you wonder?”
“Ooooh, yes,” Paul said. “Just right. She’s such a lying bitch. Let me write that down.” And that was that.
So why are our knickers in such a twist over an opera that Santa Fe Opera won’t be premiering until the summer of 2009? Because we were told a couple of weeks ago that the company plans to workshop The Letter (in theater, “workshop” is a verb) in March. This is a big deal–it will be the first time that either of us has heard any of the score performed by real live human beings other than ourselves–but it also means that in order for the singers to have time to learn their parts, we have to get the music in their hands as soon as possible. Brad Woolbright, Santa Fe Opera’s artistic administrator, gave us a no-fooling deadline of February 4 (i.e., today) to send in the sections of the score that will be rehearsed at the workshop. At that point we’d already finished Scenes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 and were working on Scene 4, so we shifted into high gear and got cracking.
Needless to say, that wasn’t the only thing I had to do in January. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll recall that I spent the week of January 20 up in Connecticut writing the ninth and tenth chapters of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and I’ve also been seeing shows and cranking out my regular pieces for The Wall Street Journal and Commentary. In between these varied and variously pressing activities, I switched hats and worked on The Letter as often as possible, and from time to time I also ate and slept.
By month’s end I was starting to feel twitchy. On Saturday I took Lee Ann Westover of the Lascivious Biddies to an off-Broadway matinee, and she told me that I looked tired.
“You better believe I’m tired,” I replied. “I keep working until two and waking up at seven-thirty. I can’t shut my mind off. I’ll be soooo glad when I get this damn book in the can so that I can concentrate on the opera.”
“Don’t try to kid me,” she said. “You like being stressed out. You eat it up. You’ll probably start writing another book the day after you finish this one.”
I laughed. “Well, maybe not that soon,” I said. “I think Mrs. T might like it if I took a week off. Or maybe even two.”

“An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.”
Maria Callas (quoted in Arianna Stassinopoulos, Maria Callas)

My “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal is about the Atlanta Symphony’s decision to build a 12,000-seat suburban outdoor amphitheatre–in which classical music will rarely be performed. Instead the orchestra plans to book rock acts and Broadway shows into the new facility, then use the proceeds to underwrite its regular concerts and pay off its accumulated debt. Is that up-to-the-minute thinking for a post-highbrow age, or a decision the members of the Atlanta Symphony will live to regret?
Here’s a sample:

By opting to acknowledge long-term demographic trends and follow its patrons to the suburbs, the Atlanta Opera helped to chart a course for what may well be the future of the arts in America. The Atlanta Symphony, by contrast, is acknowledging another, less encouraging aspect of that future, which is that fewer and fewer Americans seem to care for the fine arts. That’s not true across the board–opera is drawing bigger crowds than ever before–but studies like the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent “To Read or Not to Read” survey point to an overall decline in public interest in high culture….
That’s why the ASO is opening Encore Park. If you can’t make ends meet by selling tickets to classical concerts, why not sell tickets to rock concerts and use the proceeds to underwrite the classical end of your business? It makes sense on paper, and it’s worked before. That’s how the classical-recording business operated a half-century ago, when a label like Columbia would use part of the profits from its pop releases to cover the losses of its Masterworks classical division. The assumption was that great recordings of the classics by artists like Leonard Bernstein and Rudolf Serkin would sell enough copies over the long haul to pay for themselves–and that’s just what happened. But then the major record labels were swallowed up by multinational corporations and had to justify the low short-term profits of their classical releases to their investors. That’s when crossover was born, followed shortly thereafter by the decimation of the classical recording industry.
Might the same thing happen to fine-arts institutions like the ASO that seek to pay for their highbrow activities by getting into the pop-culture business? The answer is that it’s already happening. Regional symphony orchestras and theater companies are increasingly finding themselves squeezed off the stages of performing-arts centers by high-grossing Broadway road shows….

Read the whole thing here.

Sorry, work ate up my week, and I’ve felt toward my life like Daniel Day-Lewis getting swept away in Last of the Mohicans, all “You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you!”
For one little project I had to compile a list of business jargon. Trolling around the Internet looking for lingo, I came across this bit of wisdom in an article about procrastination*:

Make up your own rewards. For example, promise yourself a piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime if you’ve completed a certain task.

It’s such a minor, random thing but I’m completely diverted by that “piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime.” At the paper where I used to work my friend M. and I went through a period where we tried to insert the phrase “in the ensuing melee” into all of our articles, e.g., “City Council debated the measure and in the ensuing melee the motion passed with a 7-2 vote.” And as this article is otherwise sane, I’m just going to guess that the writers at MindTools have something similar going with “piece of tasty flapjack.”
So, more here Monday. Until then, hope you have a good weekend with lots of tasty flapjacks!
* Also, can there be anything that smacks more of procrastination than reading an article about how not to procrastinate? The whole thing should be four words: “Get back to work.”

On Wednesday I drove out to Red Bank, New Jersey, the home of Edmund Wilson and Count Basie to see a production of Macbeth, to which most of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted. I also make brief but favorable mention of Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Trojan Women. Here’s a sample.

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Abraham Lincoln, who knew a thing or two about writing, esteemed “Macbeth” above all other plays. “I think nothing equals ‘Macbeth,'” he said. “It is wonderful.” It’s also concise–Shakespeare never penned a shorter tragedy–and full of supernatural skullduggery and R-rated violence. The words “blood,” “bloody” and “bloodier” are used 36 times in the text. It is, in short, the perfect Shakespeare play for those who’ve never seen one, and Two River Theater Company’s new production might have been made for such folk. Jointly staged by Aaron Posner, the company’s artistic director, and Teller, the magician with the single-barreled name who lets his partner, Penn Jillette, do the talking, Two River’s “Macbeth” is a spook show that sheds almost as much blood as Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd,” and does so with equally thrilling results.

Yes, there’s plenty of stage trickery in this “Macbeth,” but that isn’t the main reason to see it. Between them, Mr. Posner and Mr. Teller have given us a production whose flamboyant theatricality is matched by its colloquial directness. The pace is brisk–several scenes are made to overlap with one another–and the staging sharply detailed without lapsing into fussiness. Atmospheric lighting, evocative music, believable swordplay: All are used not merely for their own sake but to give Shakespeare’s poetry the explosive and overwhelming effect of a truck bomb.

Time and again individual lines and whole speeches are illuminated by action so appropriate that you’ll sit up and catch your breath. “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack’d,” Macbeth (Ian Merrill Peakes) says, then flashes a sickly grin that gives away the fear he feels inside. A messenger tells Macduff (Cody Nickell) that his family has been murdered in cold blood, then puts his hand over his mouth in shock. “My wife kill’d too?” Macduff asks in reply, clasping his hands tightly behind his back as if to hold himself together. A little later another messenger informs Macbeth that his own wife (Kate Eastwood Norris) has committed suicide, and he grabs the man’s bloody hand and smears her gore on his cheek….

Speaking of graphic violence, Classical Theatre of Harlem and Harlem Stage have collaborated on an updated version of Euripides’ “Trojan Women” set in the ruins of a Manhattan train station that incorporates first-hand testimony from survivors of the atrocities committed in the recent civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Staged and freely adapted by Alfred Preisser and mounted in the attractive new performance space that has been carved out of the Harlem Gatehouse, which once served as a pumping station, it clocks in at 75 minutes flat. The chorus is uneven, but Mr. Preisser’s adaptation is a potent brew of timeless tragedy and modern brutality…

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Read the whole thing here.

“Murder’s never perfect. Always comes apart sooner or later. And when two people are involved, it’s usually sooner.”
Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, screenplay for Double Indemnity