Irritable spring, infuse
Into the burning breast
Your combustible juice.
Allen Tate, “Seasons of the Soul”
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Irritable spring, infuse
Into the burning breast
Your combustible juice.
Allen Tate, “Seasons of the Soul”
The extensive changes that Arthur Laurents made in the new Broadway revival of West Side Story (about which I wrote here) have inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal about creative artists who decide to tinker with their early works. Why not leave well enough alone? Was it mere retrospective perfectionism that led Igor Stravinsky to reorchestrate The Firebird and Petrushka–or did he have baser motives? And did Henry James really improve his novels when he revised them for the New York Edition of his collected works? I speculate about all these examples and a few more to boot in today’s Journal. Pick up a paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
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The prologue from the 1961 film version of West Side Story, choreographed by Jerome Robbins and directed by Robbins and Robert Wise:
The page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong arrived a few minutes ahead of Mrs. T.
This is a great day.
I rejoice to report in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column that Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is first-rate in every way. Not so, alas, the Broadway transfer of Next to Normal. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway and August Wilson never quite got along. All ten of his plays about black life in 20th-century America were seen there–finally–but their runs were usually short, and Lincoln Center Theater’s new production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is only the second Broadway revival of any of Wilson’s plays. That isn’t exactly surprising. It’s only been in recent years that Broadway producers have started making a concerted attempt to reach out to black audiences, and Wilson’s last three plays, “King Hedley II,” “Gem of the Ocean” and “Radio Golf,” were far less effective than the ones that came before them. But “Joe Turner,” which was last seen on Broadway for three months in 1988, is out of his top drawer, and this revival, whose magnificent cast has been directed by Bartlett Sher with uncommon sensitivity, might just manage to break the late playwright’s long string of bad luck.
Or not: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is a long, occasionally knotty play that asks much of its viewers, and Broadway has become an increasingly inhospitable place for serious drama. Nowadays it generally takes a Hollywood star to keep a straight play open, and no one in “Joe Turner” has that kind of drawing power. So let me put it as simply as I can: This is a show you must see. Like David Cromer’s Off-Broadway revival of “Our Town,” it will remind you of how good live theater can be…
Every August Wilson revival that I’ve covered in this space in the past few years has been staged in a style best described as smell-the-coffee realism. (The Signature Theatre Company’s 2006 Off-Broadway revival of “Two Trains Running” actually had a working coffee pot on stage.) Mr. Sher and Michael Yeargan, his designer, have taken a different tack, situating the action of “Joe Turner” in a stylized, semi-abstract playing space that is meant to underline the play’s expressionistic aspect. While I didn’t find the décor wholly persuasive–Mr. Yeargan’s complicated set has a few too many moving parts–I very much appreciated Mr. Sher’s willingness to break with tradition, and his cast clearly appreciates the freshness of his approach….
It took Jimi Hendrix three and a half minutes to tell the world that “manic depression is a frustrating mess.” Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey spend two and a half hours saying the same thing in “Next to Normal,” a musical about a suburban mother (Alice Ripley) who suffers from a case of bipolar disorder so incapacitating that it has made her suicidal and left her husband (J. Robert Spencer) and daughter (Jennifer Damiano) at the ends of their fast-fraying ropes. The idea isn’t unpromising, but Mr. Yorkey’s glib book and artless lyrics boil down to an evening-long whine of let-me-tell-you-all-about-how-I-feel narcissism…
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Read the whole thing here.
“Cure for an obsession: get another one.”
Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms
I flew the coop earlier this afternoon and strolled across Central Park to see the Bonnard show at the Metropolitan Museum. More on Monday, but since the show closes on Sunday, I’ll just say for now that if you’re going to be in or near New York City between now and then, you really, really need to see “Bonnard: The Late Interiors.” I can’t believe I almost missed it!
Make haste.
I just got the following e-mail from Larry Cooper, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor in Boston who is in charge of the manuscript of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:
The proofs just arrived, early by a few days. Where shall I send them? I will wait for your reply.
No, I’m not shaking like a leaf–yet. But ask me again tomorrow….
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)
• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, 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:
• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes May 3, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)
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