Archives for May 2008

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)

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

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)

• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN MILLBURN, N.J.:

• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, closes May 18, reviewed here)

Finally, a major American newspaper has run an obituary of Elaine Dundy–and guess where it is? In Los Angeles. Another raspberry to the New York Times!
I note with pleasure the following paragraph about The Dud Avocado:

When the book was reissued last year in the New York Review Books classics series, critic Terry Teachout described Sally Jay as the “spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones,” a characterization that Dundy relished.

I’m glad to know that.

“You know, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about you and me. I love you with my whole being, solemnly and seriously. These last times have made me realise how serious love is, what a great responsibility and what a sharing of personalities–it’s not just a pleasure & a self indulgence. Our love must be complete and a creation in itself, a gift which we must be fully conscious of & responsible for.”
Peter Pears, letter to Benjamin Britten (c. December 1942)

The Broadway season ends tomorrow, and the openings have been coming so fast and furious in recent days that I’ve been forced to double up on this week’s Wall Street Journal drama columns. In today’s paper I review two very different shows, the Broadway revival of Boeing-Boeing and BAM Harvey’s production of Endgame. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Let us now praise farce, the most ruthless form of comedy, in which a hubristically self-satisfied character (usually male) is faced with the prospect of imminent humiliation (usually sexual) and does all he can to avoid it, thereby making matters worse. I love farce, but for some reason New York producers steer clear of it, and it’s been some years since a slamming-door farce last played on Broadway. Now the drought is over: “Boeing-Boeing,” which was a hit in London last year, has crossed the Atlantic in time for this year’s Tony nominations, of which it will surely receive a hatful.
“Boeing-Boeing” is a seven-door farce set in the Paris bachelor pad of Bernard (Bradley Whitford), a businessman with three fiancées, all of them stewardessses. They’re never in town at the same time, which permits him to bed them seriatim. This being a farce, such well-laid plans are naturally predestined to collapse into a heap of smoking rubble. The dégringolade begins when Bernard’s mousy buddy Robert (Mark Rylance) drops by for a visit just as Fiancée No. 1, a cheerfully promiscuous New Yorker named Gloria (Kathryn Hahn), departs through Door No. 4, making way for Fiancée No. 2, a jealous Italian babe named Gabriella (Gina Gershon). Then Fiancée No. 3, a German giantess named Gretchen (Mary McCormack), shows up–her plane landed early–and within mere minutes things are way, way, way out of hand.
The plot of “Boeing-Boeing” is a skein of silliness and the characters ethnic cartoons, meaning that the show must be flawlessly cast and directed with ultra-finicky timing in order to work. The good news–make that great news–is that these conditions are seen and raised in Matthew Warchus’ staging. Top honors go to Mr. Rylance, a Shakespearean actor-director whose lunatic performance as Robert startled the hell out of the London critics. Imagine (if you can) a balding, adenoidal milksop with mismatched eyebrows who strolls into Bernard’s ménage à quatre, sees what he’s been missing and decides that the time has come for him to embrace the more abundant sexual life….
The last time I saw “Endgame,” 9/11 loomed three years nearer in the rear-view mirror, which added an extra twist of relevance to Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic 1957 comedy about four people who appear to be all alone in what is left of the world. I use the term “comedy” loosely, but much of “Endgame” really is supposed to be laughable–if grimly so–which is what gives the play its mordant punch.
Rightly or wrongly, though, New Yorkers are feeling rather less anxious these days, and I wonder whether that might explain why I found BAM Harvey’s star-studded new production of “Endgame” to be somewhat less compelling than the potent revival mounted by the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2005. Or perhaps the play itself isn’t quite as good as I once thought it was. Nobody ever accused Beckett of being obvious, but “Endgame,” much to my surprise, now seems to me to border on heavy-handedness in its portrayal of the dark encounter that awaits us all…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

At last, an Elaine Dundy obit–from England. (Arrgh.)

INTERVIEWER: You’ve said that one of the things you like about theater is that it’s a collaborative art and that you in a sense have a family. Again, to the layperson, it’s amazing, with all those people involved, that a musical ever gets on. In your experience as a collaborator in the process, when it works, what makes it successful?
SONDHEIM: The answer is so obvious that it will not seem like an answer. You have to be sure that you’re writing the same show. That’s something that I didn’t discover about [A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum] until too late. We weren’t writing the same show, even after we’d spent the better part of four years on it. They were writing a certain kind of show, and I was writing a certain kind of score, and none of us recognized that they were slightly different. I learned from that, and so the preliminary discussions for any show I do with my collaborators are to be sure that we’re writing the same show. That’s what makes it work.
Stephen Sondheim (quoted in Jackson R. Bryer and Richard A. Davison, The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators)

Still no Elaine Dundy obituary in the New York Times–or any other newspaper, so far as I know. Don’t these people read blogs? Or books published prior to 1995? Or anything?

Doing nothing no longer comes naturally to me, but I gave it my best shot yesterday. To be sure, I didn’t spend the whole day doing nothing. I couldn’t–I had a deadline to hit. I got up at seven, wrote and filed my Wall Street Journal drama column, answered my e-mail, and took note of the death of Elaine Dundy. But by noon I was through with the day’s work, so I put on my clothes (yes, I write in dishabille) and strolled over to Columbus Avenue. I caught a cab and told the driver to take me to Danal, where my old friend Rick Brookhiser stood me to a champagne luncheon in honor of the completion of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

“So, what are the first and last words of the book?” Rick asked.

“Ah, the Jane Chord!” I replied.

The Jane Chord, to which Bill Buckley introduced us years ago, is a concept originally promulgated by Hugh Kenner. The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver–the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built–and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it’s still a good game to play.

It had been ages since I’d last struck a Jane Chord, but no sooner did Rick remind me of the rules than I started racking my memory to see if I could recall the chord for Rhythm Man. A moment later I came up with the first and last sentences of the book, and I let out a whoop of delight as I realized that I’d unconsciously put together a humdinger: New/whole.

After lunch I came straight home, curled up on the couch, and spent the next couple of hours listening to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and rereading Doug Ramsey’s Paul Desmond biography, at which I hadn’t looked since I reviewed it for the Journal three years ago:

You may not know Paul Desmond’s name, but you’ve almost certainly heard his music. He wrote “Take Five,” a sinuous minor-key tune in the once-exotic time signature of 5/4 (marches are in 2/4, waltzes in 3/4, pop songs in 4/4) that was recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. It shot up the charts a year and a half later, becoming the first jazz instrumental to sell a million copies.

In addition to making its composer rich, “Take Five” also introduced the public at large to the inimitable sound of Desmond’s cool-toned, unsentimentally lyrical alto saxophone playing, which he aptly described as the musical equivalent of a dry martini. In part because of the unexpected popularity of “Take Five,” Brubeck and Desmond became the most famous jazz musicians of the ’60s, and “Time Out,” from which the song was drawn, remains to this day one of jazz’s top-selling albums.

As if being rich and famous weren’t enough, Desmond was also a talented writer of prose (usually in the form of wryly witty liner notes for his solo albums), a preternaturally successful ladies’ man (he preferred fashion models, though he made an exception for the young Gloria Steinem) and a seemingly inexhaustible bon vivant (Elaine’s was his after-hours hangout of choice). He also managed to consume far more than his lifetime quota of cigarettes, alcohol and other, more strictly controlled substances, the combined effect of which presumably contributed to his death from lung cancer in 1977. His friends have been telling tales out of school about him ever since, and one of his closest companions, the jazz critic Doug Ramsey, has now woven the best ones into a biography.

While “Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond” contains plenty of show-stopping gossip, it is in no way a pathography. Scrupulously researched and written with an attractive combination of affection and candor, it casts a bright light on Desmond’s troubled psyche without devaluing his considerable achievements as an artist. “Any of the great composers of melodies–Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin–would have been gratified to have written what Desmond created spontaneously,” Mr. Ramsey says. Strong words, but “Take Five” makes them stick.

I got so comfy that instead of going out for dinner, I stayed home, ordered a pizza, and watched a movie. I chose Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, which I hadn’t seen since shortly after I wrote about it in the New York Times in 1997, back in the long-lost days of innocence when I had only just crossed the fortieth meridian (Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?). It’s very much a young man’s film, and the denouement still doesn’t quite parse, but I was pleased to see how well the performances and the rest of the script have held up, and it felt downright luxurious to be able to watch a plot unfold without having to think about how to boil it down into a one-paragraph synopsis.

Watching Chasing Amy put me in mind of the brief gaudy hour when sharp-witted indie and indieish flicks like Clerks, Election, Ghost World, Kicking and Screaming, Living in Oblivion, Metropolitan, Next Stop Wonderland, Panic, Pi, Swingers, and You Can Count on Me seemed to be coming out every month or so. Back then I was writing about movies regularly, and I went so far as to predict in 1999 that the independent film was the wave of the narrative future:

Americans under thirty are habituated to the characteristic narrative style of film–it is far more familiar to them than that of prose fiction–and many talented young American storytellers who once might have chosen to write novels are instead making small-scale movies of considerable artistic merit….it is only a matter of time before similar films are routinely released directly to videocassette and marketed like books (or made available in downloadable form over the Internet), thus circumventing the current blockbuster-driven system of film distribution. Once that happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the twenty-first century.

I made that bold prophecy in The Wall Street Journal, then included it in A Terry Teachout Reader five years later. And what happened? I became a drama critic–and I’ve seen exactly two movies in a theater since the fall of 2005. So much for my prescience.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed my nostalgic wallow so much that I briefly considered watching another movie, but in the end I decided not to press my luck. For once I’m going to bed early, I told myself. So I called Mrs. T in Connecticut, then turned off the lights and clambered up the ladder to my loft, feeling as contented as it’s possible for me to feel when she’s there and I’m here.

Now what? Well, I’ve got another Journal column to write this morning, but once it’s done I’m finished until tomorrow. A walk in Central Park? An afternoon nap? The Metropolitan Museum? More Al and Zoot? Call me irresponsible! Why didn’t anybody ever tell me that it’s fun to do nothing?