Archives for January 2009

The bit of description that follows below has been in my head all week, since hearing about John Updike’s death. It’s from Witches of Eastwick, which I re-read a couple months ago and which, if I’m honest, is the novel of his that I feel the greatest true affection for. (Who knows where, once all the sifting & shaking is done, Witches will stand in the Updike canon; but I hope it doesn’t get struck for all the more Important Ones.)
This sentence stuck because its construction so resembles a really marvelous, elaborate marble run, and it seemed like on this week, even while we pay tribute to Updike’s Zeus-ian stature (first among writers, 60+ books, with enough good ones and bad ones in there to fuel a dozen mortal careers), it’s also nice to stop and appreciate him at this, a sentence level:

Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street, its trendy shops with their perfumed candles and stained-glass shade-pulls aimed at the summer tourists and its old-style aluminum diner next to a bakery and its barber’s next to a framer’s and its little clattering newspaper office and long dark hardware store run by Armenians, was intertwined with saltwater as it slipped and slapped and slopped against the culverts and pilings the street in part was built upon, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-wheat bread and filtered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette.

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A few tributes I’ve enjoyed:
• Lorrie Moore’s appreciation in today’s New York Times, which contains a beautiful, just-right description of Updike’s criticism as “part rose, part snake.”
• Martin Amis in The Guardian; it’s interesting to read this one, with its observation about Updike’s love for James Joyce, back to back with a story like “A&P“.
• Joseph O’Neill for Granta. (Via TEV.)

I just flew back to the East Coast from one of the most exciting reviewing trips in my six-year-long career as The Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic. I saw Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie and Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Macbeth, and both were extraordinary. Here’s an excerpt.
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The greatest of all American plays has received a production worthy of its beauty and truth. Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” one of the immortal masterpieces of 20th-century theater, is currently being performed by Kansas City Repertory Theater in a staging by David Cromer, whose Writers’ Theatre revival of “Picnic” was the best show I saw last year, not just in Chicago (where Mr. Cromer and most of his production team are based) but anywhere in America. His “Glass Menagerie” is fully as impressive. Mr. Cromer has the uncanny ability to take a too-familiar script and make it seem entirely new–yet it is his special gift to serve the plays that he stages, rather than twisting them into unrecognizable and irrelevant shapes. Such is the essence of recreative genius.
So what has Mr. Cromer done with “The Glass Menagerie”? To begin with, he has collaborated closely with his designers to create a visual environment for Williams’ play that looks nothing like any “Glass Menagerie” I’ve ever seen, even though it is fundamentally faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the text. At the center of Collette Pollard’s set is a cramped, shabby tenement apartment identical to the one described in Williams’ stage directions–except that the walls of the living room have been ripped away and are hanging askew in mid-air. Throughout the evening a stream of images related to the play is projected on these walls: words and phrases plucked from the script, “home movies” of the characters as seen in their youth, live close-ups of the actors that are shot by video cameras concealed on the set.
Radical though it sounds, all this is no more than a modern-day elaboration of what Williams had in mind for the original production of “The Glass Menagerie,” in which he called for “magic-lantern” slides to be projected on one wall of the set. The images on the slides, he explained in his production notes, were meant to “give accent to certain values in each scene.” The slides were omitted from the 1945 Broadway staging, but various attempts have been made since then to do something resembling what Williams had in mind.
Kansas City Rep’s projections, designed by Jeffrey Cady, are astonishingly effective, not least because they are so tightly woven into Mr. Cromer’s conception of the play, in which the acting is as naturalistic as the setting is surreal. Nowadays many productions of “The Glass Menagerie” run to quasi-operatic exaggeration, but the four actors whom Mr. Cromer has cast in Williams’ tale of a St. Louis family teetering on the far edge of despair have opted instead for simple understatement. Their characterizations are all fresh and unexpected….
Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare’s artistic director, has given us a modern-dress “Macbeth” set in a glossy world of press conferences, cocktail parties and departure lounges. Macbeth and his wife (Ben Carlson and Karen Aldridge) are an up-to-the-minute power couple, a crisply plain-spoken soldier married to a coarse, slutty trophy wife. Such devices may seem trendy in the telling, but Ms. Gaines and her first-class cast have instead used them as the building blocks of a dead-serious “Macbeth” that has the immediacy of a fast car shrieking down a long, straight stretch of road….
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Read the whole thing here.
Here is a video clip from Kansas City Rep’s Glass Menagerie:

David Stern, the Israeli Opera‘s new music director, announced the other day that he won’t be programming the operas of Richard Wagner in Tel Aviv. The resulting news story may have come as a surprise to American readers who are unaware that Wagner’s music is not played in Israel’s opera houses or concert halls. This informal ban, which has been in force since the founding in 1948 of the state of Israel, is the subject of my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. (It was originally scheduled to run two weeks ago but was replaced by a column about Andrew Wyeth.)
The ban, needless to say, was and is a response to Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Is it still justified? Was it ever? Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal to see what I have to say.
You might also want to take a look at Alex Ross’ The Unforgiven: Wagner and Hitler, originally published in The New Yorker in 1998, which is very much worth reading in this connection.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“The apprentice and the master love the master in different ways.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims

Sikeston, the Missouri town that normally goes under the guise of “Smalltown, U.S.A.” on this blog, was hit three days ago by a fearsome ice storm, one of the worst on record. The power is out throughout the city and its environs and is expected to remain that way for the next few days. Cellphone service is spotty. Last night I managed to talk to my brother, albeit briefly and through heavy static, during the intermission of Chicago Shakespeare’s performance of Macbeth. He told me, as best as I could make out, that my seventy-nine-year-old mother has been evacuated to Cape Girardeau, a town thirty miles north of Sikeston where the storm was much less severe and the power is still on, and that’s she’s all right. I haven’t spoken to her since the night before the storm hit.
Times like these remind me of how big America is. Right now I’m in a Chicago hotel room four hundred miles from Sikeston, but I might as well be on the far side of the world. I felt a bit like this on 9/11, when I was visiting my mother in Sikeston and suddenly found myself out of touch with my many friends in New York City. It doesn’t help that Mrs. T is in Connecticut, where the weather is somewhat better but still pretty rocky.
I’m glad I had a piece to write this morning, and that I have a show to see tonight. It’s a comfort to be distracted by art when there’s nothing to do but sit and wait.
UPDATE: I finally got through to my mother in Cape Girardeau a few minutes ago. She’s safe and warm. The situation in Sikeston, she says, is fairly chaotic and likely to remain so for a few more days, but my brother and sister-in-law are safe as well.

This is the cover of the orchestral score of The Letter, which will be published by Subito Music. Paul Moravec and I are still proofreading what’s inside, but we passed the cover for publication on Tuesday.
I’ve written or edited seven books in the past twenty years–Pops: The Life of Louis Armstrong will be the eighth–and one of the many things I’ve learned along the way is that few things in life are more exciting than seeing the dummy of a dust jacket that has your name on it. For me, at any rate, that’s the first moment in the publishing process when a book starts to seem real.
The Letter, by contrast, has seemed real to me ever since the Santa Fe Opera workshopped the first six scenes in front of a live audience last March, and it became realer still in December when Paul and I got our first look at Hildegard Bechtler’s set designs. Yet my heart still beat a little faster when I opened up the e-mail from David Murray of Subito Music that contained the cover design for The Letter. No, it’s not especially fancy, but it seems to me both elegant and suitable. And…real.

A friend writes in response to my recent posting about my Louis Armstrong biography:

“Sooner or later, everyone who interviews me about Pops will ask some variation on this question: Why do we need another book about Satchmo? The short answer is that I am…”

Terry.

I stopped reading (at the ellipsis).

The short answer is (as if I were you, speaking): Because I never wrote one before.

I would believe this about any “subject” and about any writer. There may be a million books about Mahler, but someday, SOMEDAY, there is going to be one written by a person who somehow actually speaks to ME! And THAT will be the Mahler bio I turn to again and again. Same with Louis Armstrong. There may be a million books, but I’ve not read a single one. There NEEDS to be another (another, another, and another) book about singularly interesting people, subjects, topics…because “the greatest book” or “definitive version” is not universal. I just do NOT believe it can be so. Your book needs to be written because you, your voice, will speak to people who a) may never have read about Louis Armstrong, b) know every book on Armstrong, but read yours and say, wow, what a great new facet!, c) know every book, and think yours sucks, and thus are inspired to TALK ABOUT IT, and WHY. And there’s probably d) e) and f) too.

O.K. So now I’ll go actually read your post….

My friend is a bit of an idealist, but I happen to agree with her, though I’d put it somewhat differently: there’s no such thing as a definitive biography of a great man. There can’t be. A great man (or woman) is too big to cram into a book-sized box. The best that you can do is offer a summary of the current state of knowledge about him, written from your own point of view–but you can never know everything there is to know. The day after your book is published, somebody may dig up an immensely important fact that you missed, or interpret the facts that you dug up in a way that makes more sense than your version. Biographical understanding is a journey without a destination, only stops along the way.

For this reason I, too, believe that there ought to be many books about Armstrong. As I recently said in an e-mail to Ricky Riccardi, the indefatigable Armstrong blogger who is currently writing a book about Armstrong’s later years:

I hope that Pops provides stimulus for the emerging monographic literature on Louis Armstrong. That your book will come out a year after mine seems to me enormously appropriate and significant–it will be a signal that specific aspects of Armstrong’s life and work are now seen as no less deserving of full-length treatment than, say, Matisse’s later years. If that wish comes true, then I’ll undoubtedly want to publish a revised edition of Pops in, say, 2030.

I should live so long!

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)

• 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:

• The Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

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

IN CHICAGO:

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:

• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN FRANCISCO:

• Rich and Famous (comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN FORT MYERS, FLA.:

• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• The Chairs (surrealist comedy, PG-13, far too complicated for children, reviewed here)

“Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.”
William Manchester (quoted in Book-of-the-Month Club News, June 1983)

As expected, the Washington Post has announced that Book World, its stand-alone book-review supplement, will publish its last issue on February 15. Thereafter the Post‘s book-related content will be integrated into the paper–but it will also be consolidated into a separate online section.
According to the New York Times:

Under the new arrangement at Book World, the combined pages allocated to books in the two sections will be equivalent to about 12 tabloid pages, down from the 16 published in the stand-alone section. The staff of Book World, already shrunk dramatically from its peak, will remain intact.

I’m sorry about that, but I must confess that the larger decision to kill off the print version means nothing to me, not because I don’t like Book World but because I read all newspapers (including the one for which I write) online. As far as I’m concerned, the fuss over this development is pointless, given that the magazine will continue to be available as a unified entity on the Post‘s Web site.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: it is the destiny of serious arts journalism to migrate to the Web. This includes newspaper arts journalism. Most younger readers–as well as a considerable number of older ones, myself among them–have already made that leap. Why tear your hair because the Washington Post has decided to bow to the inevitable? The point is that the Post is still covering books, and the paper’s decision to continue to publish an online version of Book World strikes me as enlightened, so long as the online “magazine” is edited and designed in such a way as to retain a visual and stylistic identity of its own.
Newspapers are in trouble now because their editors and publishers have spent the past decade turning their faces from the inevitable effects of the coming of the Web. Writers would do well not to make the same mistake. So enough with the anguished kvetching already. Let’s turn loose of the past and see what we can make of the future.
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Sarah Weinman’s take is here.