Archives for June 2009

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)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, then reopens Sept. 8 and runs through Nov. 15, reviewed here)

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

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests * (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Waiting for Godot * (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, closes July 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Coraline (musical, G, possibly too scary for small children and very problematic for twee-hating adults, 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)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, extended through Aug. 2, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Design for Living (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Arcadia (serious comedy, PG-13, too complicated for children and slow-witted adults, closes June 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN STAUNTON, VA.:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (serious comedy, PG-13, too complicated for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN DALLAS:

• Lost in the Stars (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN HOUSTON:

• Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Exit the King * (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone * (drama, PG-13, some adult subject matter, accessible to adolescents with mature attention spans, reviewed here)

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (trans. Justin O’Brien)

Have any of the readers of this blog seen this film? Has it ever been transferred to videocassette or DVD? Do any prints survive?

When I visited Ontario last week to review the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I tweeted that I was in town. Seconds later I was reading a direct message from Sandra Mogensen, a Stratford-based pianist and opera coach:

Very exciting in the past week or so–working on “The Letter” w/Rog after reading so much about it in “About Last Night.” (Mittfuls o’ notes!)

It took a moment for the coin to drop, but then I laughed out loud: “Rog” is Roger Honeywell, the tenor who’s creating the role of Geoff Hammond, the faithless lover who gets shot in The Letter. (“Mittfuls o’ notes” refers to the fact that the piano-vocal score of the opera, like most two-handed reductions of a piece of music originally written for full orchestra, is hard to play.)
I’d never met Roger and had no idea that he lived in Stratford. Now, thanks to Twitter, I was in touch with his coach, and a day later I was sitting in the living room of his house, which was a two-minute drive from the hotel where Mrs. T and I were staying. Not at all surprisingly, he turned out to be a great guy, forthright and funny, and the two of us talked shop for a couple of hours while his delightful wife fed us homemade chocolate candy. (The three of us also caught a bat that flew into the house midway through my visit. “I’ll help–I’m a full-service librettist,” I obligingly informed my hostess.) I learned in the course of the conversation that Roger had been a professional actor before he took up opera singing, a credential that I expect will serve him very well when he gets up on stage with Patricia Racette, the star of The Letter and one of the finest singing actresses I know.
I don’t believe in omens, but if I did, I’m sure I would have concluded on the spot that meeting Roger in so serendipitous a manner filled the bill. Truth to tell, though, the creation of The Letter has felt like one long string of omenesque occurrences. Hardly anything has gone wrong since the Santa Fe Opera commissioned Paul Moravec and me to turn Somerset Maugham’s play into an opera, and now that the first performance is six short weeks away, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to believe that things are continuing to go so smoothly. Yesterday the company e-mailed me the proofs of the ten-page section of the 2009-10 program booklet that will be devoted to The Letter, and I was thrilled–stunned, really–by how beautifully it was designed. I keep expecting something terrible to happen as the premiere draws near, theater being what it is, but so far, everything is going fabulously, improbably well.
As for Sandra, she popped by my hotel the next morning to present me with her latest CD, a collection of solo pieces and song transcriptions by Edvard Grieg. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I’ll be surprised if it’s anything other than gorgeous. These days everyone connected with The Letter seems to be on a lucky streak. May it last!

Anna Pavlova dances “The Dying Swan,” choreographed by Michel Fokine and set to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan”:

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

“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (courtesy of Marissabidilla)

Last week I linked to a finely reported and beautifully written story by Tom French, “Elegy for the King and Queen.” Devra Hall, whose site Devra DoWrite has long graced our blogroll, responded by posting links to several additional stories by French, who was her teacher. Devra reveals that French followed “Elegy” with a nine-part series on zoos and animals, “Zoo Story” (linked in her post) and she has sobering reflections on the demise of long-form narrative journalism like French’s.
Read her welcome post and follow her links to additional work by “a masterful narrative writer.” I spent part of last weekend reading the Pulitzer-winning “Angels and Demons,” which absorbed me almost beyond reach, and I’m now halfway through “The Hard Road.” Great stuff–thanks for the trove of links, Devra.

“Westerns are timeless. The soundtracks rarely are.” Lileks tweeted that pithy two-liner a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I love Westerns, but most of them have scores that are inoffensive at best, appallingly banal at worst. The exceptions to the rule are as rare as they’re noteworthy. The other night Mrs. T and I watched André De Toth’s Ramrod, a wonderful little 1947 ranch-war film starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake (it wasn’t their first film together, by the way). I confess to not having noticed the music when I first saw Ramrod, but this time around I was startled to discover that it was the work of Adolph Deutsch, a very fine composer who also scored The Maltese Falcon and The Apartment, and I was struck by how much his taut, cliché-free music contributed to the film’s total effect.

The next day I remembered that in 2003 I posted a list of my favorite Westerns, one of which is Ramrod. Here are the others, together with the names of the men who scored them:

• Blood on the Moon (1948), directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes. The music is by Roy Webb, RKO’s insufficiently appreciated house composer, a specialist in suspense who also scored Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Notorious, and Out of the Past. Alas, I can’t recall the music, which is surprising, since I’m a great fan of Webb’s work.

• Canyon Passage (1946), directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. The uncredited music is by Frank Skinner, a prolific studio hack, and I don’t remember a note of it. Fortunately, the film also features several songs written and sung by Hoagy Carmichael, including the delightful “Ole Buttermilk Sky.”

• Four Faces West (1948), directed by Alfred E. Green and starring Joel McCrea. I’ve seen it four times and still can’t tell you anything about the score, which was written by Paul Sawtell, another forgotten studio journeyman who churned out functional background music by the yard. (This, by the way, is the only Hollywood Western in which not a single shot is fired.)

• Hondo (1953), directed by John Farrow and starring John Wayne and Geraldine Page. Part of the score is by Hugo Friedhofer, who wrote the masterful music for The Best Years of Our Lives, and the rest is by Lionel Newman, Alfred’s brother, who was better known as a studio conductor. It isn’t hard to tell who wrote what: Friedhofer’s work is original and incisive, Newman’s conventional.

• Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Dimitri Tiomkin scored this one in his usual Tchaikovsky-goes-West manner. Not my thing, to put it mildly, but at least it doesn’t get in the way.

• Ride Lonesome (1959), directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott and Pernell Roberts. Heinz Roemheld’s score is a repetitious string of clippity-cloppety clichés. It’s a tribute to the film’s dramatic force that the trite music doesn’t sink it. (The only Boetticher-Scott film with good music is Seven Men from Now, which was scored by Henry Vars.)

• Ride the High Country (1962), directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. The music is by George Bassman, who is best known for writing “Let’s Dance,” Benny Goodman’s theme song. It’s a first-rate piece of work built around a spacious main theme that Bassman ingeniously transforms into the powerful ostinato-based set piece used to accompany the climactic gun battle. A classic of Western film music, though not widely recognized as such.

• Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Angie Dickinson. Another Dimitri Tiomkin score, dramatically effective but musically undistinguished. (Do any of Hawks’ films have memorable background music? I’m coming up blank.)

• The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. Max Steiner, of all people, scored the greatest of all Western films, and though he was more at home with romantic melodrama, his lush, expansive idiom works unexpectedly well here.

• Winchester ’73 (1950), directed by Anthony Mann. Did this one even have a score? Walter Scharf supposedly wrote it, but he didn’t get screen credit and it hasn’t stayed with me.

Not a very good batting average, in short, and I can’t think of many other Westerns that have noteworthy scores, though Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven, Jerry Fielding’s The Wild Bunch, Bernard Herrmann’s Garden of Evil, and Jerome Moross’s The Big Country are all deserving of enthusiastic mention. For the most part, though, I’d have to say on reflection that Lileks called it: the best Westerns tend as a rule to be far better than their music.

UPDATE: Everybody’s been asking me about Ennio Morricone’s scores for Once Upon a Time in the West and the “spaghetti Westerns” featuring Clint Eastwood. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the inverse of what I was talking about in the above post: Westerns whose music is better than the film it accompanies.