Archives for September 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)

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

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

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN HARTFORD, CONN.:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (comedy, G, surprisingly child-friendly, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream/Widowers’ Houses (comedies, G, playing in repertory through Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Half a Sixpence (musical, G, reviewed here)

“Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.”
James Thurber, letter to Malcolm Cowley, March 11, 1954

After ages and ages away, I’m going to ease back into this blogging business with a few good links.
• Are you reading Patrick Kurp’s literary blog Anecdotal Evidence every day? Patrick is a widely traveled and discerning reader whose posts I’ve begun to regard as almost a fourth daily meal: I leave them feeling not only delighted but somehow substantially fed. Here he is on the evolution of literary taste with age, on Chekhov and oysters, and on our newest poet laureate. Essential.
• An editor friend sends along Brian Doyle’s Kenyon Review essay on the art of saying no–and yes–to writers. Doyle is the editor of one of the most distinctive university magazines in the country, Portland Magazine from the University of Portland. Here’s a bit from Doyle’s essay:

Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent a gentle yellow slip of paper with the magazine’s logo and a couple of gentle sentences saying, gently, no. Under the brisker Robert Gottlieb, the magazine sent a similar note, this one courteously mentioning the “evident quality” of your submission even as the submission is declined. Harper’s and the Atlantic lean on the traditional Thank You But; Grand Street, among other sniffy literary quarterlies, icily declines to read your submission if it has not been solicited; the Sun responds some months later with a long friendly note from the editor in which he mentions that he is not accepting your piece even as he vigorously commends the writing of it; the Nation thanks you for thinking of the Nation; and the Virginia Quarterly Review sends, or used to send, a lovely engraved card, which is worth the price of rejection. The only rejection notice I keep in plain view is that one, for the clean lines of its limbs and the grace with which it delivers its blow to the groin.

In addition to its tales of rejection and acceptance–experienced from both sides of the editor’s desk–the essay is notable for containing this account of the author’s proposal to his wife:

She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse.

A brief silent film of Pierre-Auguste Renoir at work, shot circa 1917. For more information about the clip, go here:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting.”
Jean Renoir (quoted in the New York Times, Sept. 28, 1969)

Mrs. T and I have resumed our travels. At present we’re in Cape May, an island resort town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where we’ll be seeing two shows, Cape May Stage’s Doubt and the East Lynne Theatre Company’s To the Ladies. Both companies are new to me–I’ve never seen any theater in Cape May–and I’m looking forward to making their acquaintance. We’re staying at Rhythm of the Sea, a wonderful oceanside inn of which we already have the fondest possible memories, and I mean to take off enough time between shows to recover from a severe case of chronic overwork.

From Cape May we travel to Madison, New Jersey, home of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which is presenting Laila Robins, an actress I admire greatly, in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a play about which, as some of you will recall, I have long had my doubts. Be that as it may, the role of Blanche DuBois was made for Robins, and I wouldn’t dream of missing this production.

On Friday we return to New York, and the next morning I fly down to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Carolina Ballet, a company for which I have the utmost admiration, is giving the premiere of Robert Weiss’ Time Gallery, which is set to the music of Paul Moravec, who needs no introduction to regular readers of this blog. According to Carolina Ballet’s Web site, “Time Gallery explores the many facets of time–the cycles of life, the cycle of the day, how our memories affect our relationship to time’s passing. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec’s rhythmically complex score provides the texture upon which to build a dance through time.”

Weiss, a Balanchine-trained choreographer whose work I’ve championed for many years, is very excited about Time Gallery, whose score is a work of the same name that was premiered by Eighth Blackbird in 2001 and recorded by them for Naxos five years later. I covered the premiere for the Washington Post in my old “Second City” column:

Eighth Blackbird is a spiffy sextet from Chicago that specializes in avant-garde music of the old-fashioned, hyper-complicated sort, while Moravec is one of the accessibility-conscious “new tonalists” who are giving contemporary classical music a much-needed makeover. It’s an odd match, but Moravec had the clever idea to write a piece that deploys the whole avant-garde bag of tricks–a multimedia slide show, electronic-music interludes, even a touch of performance art–in support of a score that is unabashedly tonal and breathtakingly beautiful. I sat on the edge of my seat as each movement unfolded, acutely aware that I was hearing an important new work, perhaps even a masterpiece, for the very first time….

I couldn’t very well miss the world premiere of a ballet based on a piece like that, could I? Not hardly. So I’ll be in Raleigh long enough to catch two performances of Time Gallery on Saturday.

Then it’s back to New York for…but enough about me! Our Girl and CAAF are about to return to the blog after a long absence, so I’m going to take a week and a half off (except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings) and leave things to them.

Later.

“Work as joy, inaccessible to the psychologists.”
Franz Kafka, notebook entry, 1918

Some Ike-related art news, by way of Modern Art Notes: Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is flooded. As of today, the house is accessible only by boat, and tours have been suspended indefinitely. Mrs. T, Our Girl, and I visited the house last year and found it both beautiful and fascinating, though we also found it hard to imagine living there. Be that as it may, the fact that this landmark of architectural modernism is under siege saddens me greatly.
For a detailed report on the damage–which I fear will be considerable–go here.