Archives for 2008

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I’m the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. As I wrote in my “Sightings” column a couple of years ago:

The time has come for American playgoers–and, no less important, arts editors–to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don’t know what’s hot in “the stix,” you don’t know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

But suppose you run a company I haven’t visited? How might you get me to come see you? Now’s the time to start asking that question, because I’m starting to work on my reviewing calendar for the summer of 2009. So here’s an updated version of the guidelines I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see–along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don’t review dinner theater, and it’s unusual for me to visit children’s theaters. I’m somewhat more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I’m strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season… That doesn’t apply to summer festivals, but it’s rare for me to cover a festival that doesn’t put on at least two shows a season.

• …and most of them have to be serious. I won’t put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The Foreigner is your idea of a daring revival, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven’t yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as the Journal‘s drama critic. Right now Colorado and Texas loom largest, but if you’re doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or Montana, I’d be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won’t visit an out-of-town company that I’ve never seen to review a play by an author of whom I’ve never heard. What I look for is an imaginative mix of revivals of major plays–definitely including comedies–and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I’ve admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Brooke Berman, Nilo Cruz, Liz Flahive, Horton Foote, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older shows I’d like to review that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, The Iceman Cometh, Loot, Man and Superman, On the Town, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit (the play, not the musical), or anything by Jean Anouilh, S.N. Behrman, William Inge, Terence Rattigan, or John Van Druten, kindly drop me a line.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two–especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Almost an Evening or The Little Dog Laughed are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you’re not already reading my Journal column, you probably ought to start.)

• I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city.) If you’re the publicist of the Lower Slobbovia Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Matchmaker, your best bet is to point out that TheaterSlobbovia just happens to be doing Ah, Wilderness! that same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to Boston instead.

• Web sites matter–a lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you’re doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I’ll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can’t spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn’t mean I won’t consider reviewing you–I know appearances can be deceiving–but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area. Like many people, I now rely on my GPS unit when driving, so it is essential that this page also include the street address of the theater where you perform. Failure to conspicuously display this address is a hanging offense. (I also suggest that you include a list of recommended restaurants and hotels that are close to the theater.)

This is an example of a good company with an unattractive, poorly organized Web site on which much of the above information is hard to find.

This is an example of a good company with an attractive, well-organized Web site on which most of the above information is easy to find.

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don’t want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Street Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the flood of random press releases. As a result, I no longer recommend that anyone write to me there. I get a lot of spam at my “About Last Night” mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal.

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I’ve come to see shows solely because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me. Go thou and do likewise.

• I acquired an eleven-year-old nephew when I married Mrs. T, an experience that is giving me a new perspective on the world of art and culture. Ian is old enough to be curious about adult entertainment, so we’ve been trying to introduce him to a somewhat higher class of movie than he’s accustomed to seeing, with mixed but not unpromising results (he liked The Triplets of Belleville but not Shane). A few weeks ago we took him to his first Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to which he responded with enthusiasm, though we ran into a bit of trouble at intermission when he caught sight of a poster advertising a production of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. He immediately assumed that it was a play about giant iguanas and demanded that I tell him all about it. “You’re not quite ready for that one, buddy,” I replied.

In recent months Ian has been taking an interest in classical music, and asked if I could burn him a CD containing some of the pieces he’d heard. He specifically asked for Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, Rossini’s Barber of Seville and William Tell Overtures, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and Grieg’s “Morning” (from Peer Gynt). I told him I’d be happy to oblige, and threw in for good measure the first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture, Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock.”

I heard all of these pieces for the first time in elementary school, back in the long-forgotten days of music-appreciation classes, and they made a deep and lasting impression on me, no doubt because of their picturesque qualities. It will be interesting to see whether and how a postmodern child responds to them.

“I would rather have peace in the world than be President.”
Harry S. Truman, Christmas message, Dec. 24, 1948

Mrs. T and I flew to Chicago on Saturday to see the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, a play about which I wrote with the highest possible enthusiasm when it was first seen on Broadway a year ago:

Conor McPherson has given us a Christmas show for the suicidally depressed. “The Seafarer” is one of those capital-I Irish plays whose characters, one of whom (Ciarán Hinds) turns out to be the Divvil Himself, get falling-down drunk, hint broadly that there’s more to life than death and spout four- and seven-letter words starting with “f” in rich, peaty brogues. It is also–no fooling–worthy of comparison with the finest work of the young Brian Friel.
Strong words, I know, but the 36-year-old Mr. McPherson has earned them. Like Mr. Letts, he’s written a midnight-black comedy, one that wrenches laughter out of the despair of frustrated men whose lives have come to naught. That it takes place in the hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning serves only to deepen the hue of the colors in which their suffering is painted: “You absolutely stink again, do you know that?” “Yeah, happy Christmas to you as well!” Yet in the midst of this world of hurt, Mr. McPherson dares to point to the possibility of hope, even transcendence, and it is this daring that gives his play the stuff of greatness….

The next morning we departed for Smalltown, U.S.A., by way of St. Louis, where we stopped off at the St. Louis Art Museum to see Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, a remarkable exhibition that Mrs. T missed when it was on display earlier this year at New York’s Jewish Museum. (It’ll be up in St. Louis through January 11.) To go from The Seafarer to Jackson Pollock to Smalltown in a mere twenty-four hours is quite a trip, culturally speaking, but we’re at least as happy here as we were at our previous stops. My family is a close one, and I only got home twice in the year almost past, not nearly often enough to please my mother–or myself, for that matter.
Don’t expect to hear much from these parts in the course of the coming week–Mrs. T and I still have a bit of Christmas shopping left to do–but rest assured that all is well down here in the southeast corner of Missouri, where the new millennium looks surprisingly like the old one and everybody I know is glad to see everyone else.

I got an e-mail last week from Andrea Schulz, my editor at Harcourt, telling me that the sales and marketing people were dissatisfied with “A Cluster of Sunlight” as a title for my Louis Armstrong biography. “No one feels a sense of Armstrong emanating from it,” she told me apologetically. “They want something more straightforward.” I gnashed my teeth for a moment, then set to the task of coming up with yet another title. I’m relieved to say that it wasn’t hard. All I had to do was consult the following footnote on page nine of the first chapter, in which I describe a televised encounter between Armstrong and Edward R. Murrow:

In Armstrong’s diphthong-rich New Orleans accent, so similar to that of deepest Brooklyn, “Murrow” became “MOY-roh.” It was less surprising that Murrow should have called him “Louie.” “All White Folks call me Louie,” he wrote in 1944. Many blacks did so, too, including most of his sidemen and at least one of his four wives, though he pronounced his first name “LEW-is,” as can be heard on his 1963 recording of “Hello, Dolly!” “Satchmo,” his favorite nickname, was rarely used by his closest friends, who usually called him “Pops.” (Armstrong had trouble remembering names, and fell early on into the habit of addressing anyone whose real name slipped his mind as “Pops.”)

Everyone I know who knew Armstrong personally has told me at one time or another that my book ought to be called “Pops.” I suggested it to Andrea, who ran it past the sales people. On Friday she reported back as follows: “I think we’ve got consensus for ‘Pops.’ How does that work for you? I think it would make a good strong cover, too.” I agree, so that’s that–I think. As of today, I am officially the author of Pops: The Life of Louis Armstrong, out next fall from Harcourt.
Take a bow, Pops.

“Something in me resists the calendar expectation of happiness. Merry Christmas yourself! it mutters as it shapes a ghostly grin.”
J.B. Priestley, Outcries and Asides

‘Tis the season for new Broadway musicals, and I review two of them in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Shrek the Musical and Pal Joey, along with a holiday show, Hartford Stage’s production of A Christmas Carol. Here’s an excerpt.
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You’re not going to be able to wiggle out of taking your children to see “Shrek the Musical,” so let me start with some good news: The sets and costumes are dynamite. They ought to be. This production is said to have cost $25 million, and looks it. Tim Hatley, the designer, has somehow contrived to create a real-life counterpart to the high-tech storybook look of the 2001 animated feature on which “Shrek” is based. Not only do the characters bear an uncanny resemblance to their digitally animated counterparts, but the show flies from scene to scene at near-cinematic velocity. The whole thing is downright uncanny, and enormous fun to behold.
The other glad tiding is that Sutton Foster, who plays Fiona, the sweet and lovely princess who falls in love with a stinky, grumpy ogre (Brian d’Arcy James), is her usual adorable self. Sweetness can be exasperating on stage, but Ms. Foster, Broadway’s biggest charmer, is so full of spunk that even the most vinegary of grouches will find her hard to resist. I didn’t even try, though I’d rather have seen Ms. Foster in…oh, “Peter Pan.” Or a revival of “The Drowsy Chaperone.” I’d have even settled for “The Sound of Music.”
Which brings us to the heart of the matter: “Shrek” is for kids, and no one else. If yours liked the movie, they’ll like the musical, which has been cunningly calculated to rope in the present-day pre-teen crowd. The book and lyrics, by David Lindsay-Abaire, mirror the film’s jeering humor with perfect precision: Take your fluffy fun/And shove it where the sun don’t shine! Most of the jokes are of the insult-and-bodily-function genre (“Shrek” is powered less by electricity than by natural gas). Nor are we spared the starchy pro-tolerance agitprop that long ago became compulsory in cartoons…
The best way to appreciate the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Pal Joey”–the only way, really–is to approach it not as a revival but as a brand-new show that just happens to have the same score as its predecessor of the same name. Do that and you’ll find it somewhat easier to savor the performances of Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton and Jenny Fellner. If, on the other hand, you know “Pal Joey” more than casually and love it for its own sour-souled, hard-boiled sake, you’re going to have a tough time sitting through this slicked-up rewrite of one of the best musicals of the 20th century….
The Roundabout, as best as I can figure, has decided to sell “Pal Joey” by selling it out. In this production, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, the show is retrofitted as a glossy school-of-Fosse extravaganza. The fancy sets and showy steps, while pleasing enough in their own right, have little to do with the seedy, sordid world that John O’Hara conjured out of thin air in his very first stage direction: “A cheap night club, on the South Side of Chicago. Not cheap in the whorehouse way, but strictly a neighborhood joint.” Richard Greenberg, one of my least favorite contemporary playwrights, has rewritten O’Hara’s book from curtain to curtain, replacing his sharp-eared dialogue with lame, campy punch lines and smoothing out the rough edges of the plot in a way that is alien to the flint-hearted spirit of the real “Pal Joey.”…
Michael Wilson, who directed the Broadway transfer of “Dividing the Estate,” is better known as the artistic director of Hartford Stage, which is currently performing his adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.” I rarely go out of my way to see seasonal fare, which runs to the dutiful, but I’ve been so impressed by Mr. Wilson’s previous work that I decided to make an exception. I’m glad I did: “A Christmas Carol” is outstandingly well-performed and fabulously well-crafted, a merry medley of trap doors, flying ghosts and thunderous sound effects that tickles the senses without insulting the intelligence….
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Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review of Shrek here: