Archives for February 2009

The obituaries for James Whitmore had much to say about his many films, which makes sense, since they will be what most people remember best. From The Asphalt Jungle to The Shawshank Redemption, Whitmore was always a vivid and welcome presence on screen, though rarely if ever the star of the show, as he was on stage in the deservedly popular one-man plays in which he impersonated Will Rogers, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

I wrote about Whitmore in a different capacity in The Wall Street Journal, for I had the great privilege of seeing him as Sheridan Whiteside and the Stage Manager in the Peterborough Players’ revivals of The Man Who Came to Dinner and Our Town. I turned my review of the first of those two shows into a heartfelt tribute to a remarkable actor:

It’s a long, tough part, and I wondered as I drove up to New England whether an 85-year-old actor, however talented, could possibly summon up sufficient energy to make it work. I didn’t need to worry. Mr. Whitmore sailed through it like a youthful trouper, gleefully nailing each and every punch line to the back wall…

It isn’t always enjoyable to watch an actor enjoying himself on stage, so I’m pleased to report that the disciplined fun Mr. Whitmore and his colleagues are having is devoid of self-indulgence. You can tell that they know how good this show is, and their delight is impossible to resist. You can also tell how happy everybody is to be sharing the stage with an old pro. At the end of last Thursday’s performance, they went so far as to serenade their beaming star with a curtain-call chorus of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.” I’m with them.

Whitmore’s performance in Our Town was, if anything, more memorable still, partly because of the circumstances under which I saw it but mostly because he was so good. It didn’t make the obituaries, though, because he played the Stage Manager not on Broadway but in a converted barn in a small town in New Hampshire. Would that he had done it in New York City, or in front of a TV camera–but such, after all, is the evanescent nature of live theater, in which artists make miracles that vanish into the air each night, only to be recalled by those who happened to breathe the same air.

Stark Young, America’s greatest theater critic, collected some of his reviews in a volume that he called Immortal Shadows. It is my job–and my privilege–to try to confer a pinch of immortality on the performances that I see, be they on Broadway or in New Hampshire. I bless my employers for having seen fit to send me up north two summers in a row to see James Whitmore, and giving me space to write about what I saw.

Mrs. T and I had dinner last night with a long-lost friend whom I hadn’t seen for twelve years, after which the three of us went to the Irish Repertory Theater to see Brian Friel’s Aristocrats. Then we returned home and went to bed, and when I woke up this morning I was fifty-three years old. Regular readers of this blog will scarcely need to be reminded that there was a time when I didn’t expect to live to see this day, or any others–but I got married, wrote an opera, and finished a biography instead of dying. Not bad for one lifetime.

It was at the Irish Rep that I saw the first play I reviewed after I got out of the hospital three years ago. After last night’s performance of Aristocrats, an artist whom I admire greatly paid me a compliment that made me blush, the kind that you spend the rest of your life remembering on days when nothing goes right. “I’m glad I was able to say those things to you in this theater,” she added. I wish I’d had the wit to reply that I was glad I’d lived to hear her say them.

The truth is that I’m glad for each and every minute of the past three years, good and bad alike. I cannot begin to list the things for which I’m grateful. That Mrs. T heads the list goes without saying, but for everyone out there who suspects that you’re on my list as well, I have no doubt that you’re right.

Thank you, dear friends.

I’m back in New York–finally–and this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains the last fruits of my recent coast-to-coast travels. In addition to looking in on William H. Macy’s replacement performance in the Broadway revival of Speed-the-Plow, I review Shakespeare & Company’s Bad Dates in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Shattered Globe Theatre’s The Little Foxes in Chicago. Here’s an excerpt.
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How good can a fair play be? Pretty wonderful, actually–if you cast it right. Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates,” which opened Off Broadway in 2003 and has since become a regional-theater staple, is the story of a ditsy Texas waitress with 600 pairs of shoes who moves to Manhattan, goes on a string of increasingly unsatisfactory dates, falls in with a bunch of Rumanian gangsters and finds love without doing hard time. On paper it’s a cleverly written, overly cute one-woman romcom–and soi t remained when I saw Julie White play it at Playwrights Horizons six years ago. But Elizabeth Aspenlieder, a splendid stage comedienne whose zany acting is part of what makes Shakespeare & Company the best theater company in the Berkshires, has miraculously contrived to turn Ms. Rebeck’s modest little show into a poignant slice of urban life that also happens to be drop-dead funny.
How does Ms. Aspenlieder pull off this improbable act of theatrical alchemy? By taking the wise advice of Alan Ayckbourn: “Concentrate on the truth of the scene. Let the comedy take care of itself.” Unlike Ms. White, who played Haley Walker, Ms. Rebeck’s hapless heroine, as a charming caricature, Ms. Aspenlieder makes her as real as a pink slip in December. It’s not that she stints on the silliness–nobody pulls a crazier face–but she also takes care to show us the bruised rue behind the punch lines…
Intimacy is one of the most powerful weapons in the theatrical arsenal, as Chicago’s Shattered Globe Theatre is demonstrating with its eye-opening production of “The Little Foxes,” directed with uncommon finesse by Brandon Bruce.
Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play about a greedy family of Southern scoundrels is a well-made melodrama whose characters are so broadly drawn as to border on the operatic (Marc Blitzstein actually turned it into an opera, “Regina,” in 1949). It’s hard to perform “The Little Foxes” any other way in a Broadway-sized house, but Shattered Globe is mounting it in a black-box theater small enough to make it possible for the members of the ensemble cast to underplay their roles, and the results are revelatory. Linda Reiter is bracingly cold and flinty as Regina, the stone-hearted sister who’ll stop at nothing whatsoever to get what she wants. As for Kevin Kenneally, who plays Ben, the brains of the Hubbard family, his silken performance is a study of malice so sharply etched that you’ll shiver every time he smiles….
Anyone who doubts that William H. Macy is one of the foremost character actors of his generation should pay a visit to the Broadway theater where he is currently appearing in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow.” When Jeremy Piven dropped out of the show a few weeks ago, claiming to have been laid low by excessive consumption of sushi, it looked like curtains for the 20th-anniversary revival of Mr. Mamet’s three-person play about life among the vultures of Hollywood. But Mr. Macy, who has known Mr. Mamet since the world was young, nobly saved the day by stepping in and giving a substitute performance so rich and complex that it adds a whole new layer of meaning to an already fine play….
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Read the whole thing here.
Here are two scenes from Shattered Globe Theatre’s production of The Little Foxes:

“‘Except ye become as little children,’ except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, ‘ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.’ One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?

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, extended through Mar. 15, 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:

• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN KANSAS CITY:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, unsuitable for children, closes Feb. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO:

• Rich and Famous (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Our neighborhod theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little.” The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Of all the countless newspaper and magazine pieces that I’ve written over the years, one of the most immediately consequential was “Too Cool to Cash In, Favorite of the Few,” which appeared in the Sunday New York Times in 1997. It was a posthumous profile of the jazz musician Joe Mooney, who had a brief but potent vogue that I described in the opening paragraphs of the piece:

Time was when famous musicians spoke with awe of Joe Mooney, the blind jazz singer and accordionist from Paterson, N.J., who died in 1975. Frank Sinatra, not a man to toss around superlatives casually, called him “the best.”

By all rights, the object of such unstinting praise should have been famous himself, and for a little while he almost was. In 1946, Mooney and his quartet, who had been playing nightly in a Paterson bar and grill, lived out the small-time jazz musician’s wildest dream: they landed a recording contract with Decca and a weekly radio spot on ABC, were lauded in Time and The New Yorker, and began a 27-week run on 52d Street, where the likes of Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Johnny Mercer came to hear the quartet’s soft-spoken, crisply swinging brand of chamber jazz.

It was, alas, too good to be true, for the group that Down Beat magazine had called “the most exciting musical unit in the U.S. today” turned out to be too subtle to succeed commercially. Forced to break up the quartet, Mooney moved to Miami, where he spent the next decade and a half making music in comparative obscurity. “I can’t stand to be discovered one more time,” he told an admirer. Yet he returned to New York in 1963 to try his hand as a solo act, and the same thing happened all over again: star-spangled crowds, glowing reviews and a major-label recording contract, followed by total indifference from the public at large….

That, as I like to say, was a good day’s work. When I wrote this piece, none of the Mooney Quartet’s 78 recordings was available in any format. Thanks in large part to my well-placed prodding, all of them were transferred two years later to a pair of CDs, Do You Long for Oolong? and Joe Breaks the Ice, both which remain in print and can also be downloaded from iTunes. Around the same time, Mooney’s three solo LPs, Lush Life, The Happiness of Joe Mooney, and The Greatness of Joe Mooney, were reissued on CD, the second and third on a single-disc compilation. (I wrote the liner notes for most of these reissues.)

All of these recordings are wonderful, but it was and is the Mooney Quartet that I love best. As I explained in the Times:

The quartet consisted of Mooney on accordion, Andy Fitzgerald on clarinet, Jack Hotop on guitar and Gaetan (Gate) Frega on bass, an unorthodox lineup that produced some of the most distinctive sounds ever heard in small-group jazz. Not only could Mooney make his cumbersome instrument swing, he wrung from it pastel harmonies worthy of Art Tatum, and his intricate bop-flavored head arrangements made endlessly inventive use of Fitzgerald’s lithe upper-register playing, Hotop’s deft countermelodies and Mr. Frega’s springy bass lines.

Mooney sought to please both jazz lovers and ordinary listeners, playing everything from “Perdido” and “Prelude to a Kiss” to novelty tunes sung in unison by the quartet. Such group vocals had already been made popular by the King Cole Trio, but Mooney gave them a personal stamp by writing sly new original lyrics. (Here is his verse to “Meet Me at No Special Place”: You’re just as pretty as a picture/But wired for sound/If it wasn’t for your big fat mouth/You’d be fun to have around/Real great/I can hardly wait/I leave you with two words/Va-cate.) And though he was modest about his own singing, claiming that “I haven’t got a voice, just a delivery,” it was his gentle, wistful renderings of ballads like “September Song” and “They Say It’s Wonderful” that became the quartet’s trademark….

Part of what fascinated me about Mooney was the fact that he had come so close to success, close enough to be written up in a full-page story that ran in Time in 1948: “Bandsmen like Duke Ellington and players from other orchestras dropped in after hours to listen. Not since the wonderful first days of the Benny Goodman quartet had they heard the unit discipline that keeps all four men inside the same melodic scheme, yet leaves each musician free to create a succession of original and often exciting figures.”

Yet fame slipped through Mooney’s fingers, partly because his music was devoid of mass appeal and partly because he was a genuinely modest man who lacked the iron determination without which it is impossible to make a major career in the arts. I don’t doubt that he would have liked to be rich and famous, but it wasn’t in the cards, and once he finally realized that, he was content to retire to Florida and spend the rest of his life playing organ in local clubs (and at church each Sunday morning).

I wasn’t the first person to try to spread the word about Joe Mooney. In 1989 Gunther Schuller wrote about the Mooney Quartet with great eloquence and penetration in The Swing Era, comparing the group to the Modern Jazz Quartet. Bucky and John Pizzarelli have both performed and recorded his songs. More recently, Tony Bennett spoke warmly of Mooney in his autobiography. But the brief revival of interest in Mooney’s work that was triggered by my New York Times article has long since dissipated, and he is scarcely better known today than he was in 1989–or 1949, for that matter.

Mr. JazzWax, who discovered Mooney as a result of my efforts, wrote about him last week in a pair of postings that tell the story of his later career. I commend these excellent postings to your attention. As for the records, I urge you to give them a listen. Mooney isn’t for everyone–that was his problem–but if he’s for you, you’ll know it at once.

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The photographs of the Joe Mooney Quartet reproduced above were taken by Bill Gottlieb at a 1946 Decca recording session. To see other Gottlieb photographs of Mooney and his musicians, go here.