Archives for 2008

It’s not exactly a secret that I stay pretty busy, but even by my extreme standards, 2008 has been a bit on the hectic side. According to my records, I reviewed or will be reviewing a total of one hundred and fourteen shows for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, fifty-six of which took place outside New York City. (To put it another way, I reviewed shows in fourteen states and the District of Columbia.) During that time I knocked out roughly ninety columns and other pieces for the Journal and Commentary, plus a dozen or so articles that were published elsewhere, and finished writing A Cluster of Sunlight: The Life of Louis Armstrong and the libretto for The Letter.
I also made four new friends and mourned the deaths of two old ones, read a couple of hundred books and looked at a like number of paintings, saw eighteen performances of fourteen Shakespeare plays (not counting Falstaff and Kiss Me, Kate), bought three pieces of art, stayed in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, visited the grave of Willa Cather, had lunch at the Supreme Court Building, hugged Leontyne Price, posted to this blog with reasonable regularity, and spent as much time as possible in the company of Mrs. T.
I’ve been known to complain from time to time about being overworked, but for most of these things–especially the last–I am profoundly grateful. May you be as grateful for at least as many different and wondrous things on this Thanksgiving Day.

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)

• Dividing the Estate (black comedy, G, far too serious for children, reviewed here)

• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

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

• A Man for All Seasons * (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, 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:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• Picnic (drama, PG-13, adult themes, reviewed here)

“Sir, gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides)

Fred Astaire performs “One for My Baby” in the 1943 film The Sky’s the Limit:

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

“A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Christmas” (in All Things Considered)

A few months ago I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal called “Hearing Is Believing” in which I took note of the release by the British Library of a series of CDs devoted to talks by and interviews with W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells that were originally broadcast over the BBC. Now comes a pair of three-disc samplers devoted to archival recordings of broadcasts by other writers, most of whom who didn’t make it into the studio often enough to fill up a full CD.
The Spoken Word: American Writers contains recordings by James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Pearl Buck, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Patricia Highsmith, Sinclair Lewis, Anita Loos, Mary McCarthy, James Michener, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene O’Neill, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, William Styron, James Thurber, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder.
The Spoken Word: British Writers contains recordings by J.G. Ballard, Algernon Blackwood, Anthony Burgess, John le Carré, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Noël Coward, Ian Fleming, E.M. Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, Arthur Machen (who he?), Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Nancy Mitford, the Baroness Orczy (she wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel), Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, J.B. Priestley, C.P. Snow, Muriel Spark, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Angus Wilson, P.G. Wodehouse, and Virginia Woolf.
Two questions:
(1) Where the hell is Max Beerbohm?
(2) What are you waiting for? Place your order!
* * *
Incidentally, iTunes offers downloads of some interesting spoken-word recordings by famous writers of the past:
• For Kingsley Amis, search for “A Song of Experience/Nocturne.”
• For John Betjeman, search for “The Church’s Restoration/The Olympic Girl.”
• For G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy, and W.B. Yeats, search for “The Very Best Historic Voices.” (This album also contains a counterfeit recording that purports to be the voice of Oscar Wilde.)
• For T.S. Eliot, search for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• For Robert Frost, search for “Robert Frost Two Poems.”
• For Rudyard Kipling, search for “Reflections on War.”
• For Philip Larkin, search for “An Arundel Tomb/Mr. Bleaney.”
• For George Bernard Shaw, search for “Public Address on His Ninetieth Birthday.”

A reader writes:

You have written eloquently and movingly about Nancy LaMott, but I never really had a chance to hear her sing. Just now, sitting in my office, with Pandora Radio in the background, Johnny Mercer’s “When October Goes” came on. It was the most incredible singing I have ever heard. It absolutely blew me away. It’s as if her very soul was pouring out
through the song. Rare are the moments when you hear a song and you
just know that it can never–ever–be done any better. You should
remind your readers what a gift she was–and is.

My friend Nancy died thirteen years ago next month, but her voice is still with us, and I’m glad to see that people are still discovering it. That particular song is on Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer, my favorite of her albums. Give it to someone you love for Christmas.

The video and audio modules of the right-hand column have been sorely in need of updating for several months–many of the links have gone dead–so I have pulled them off the site in order to do the necessary work. This may take quite some time. Apologies in advance, and please be patient!