Archives for June 2009

Mrs. T and I are much taken with Stratford, the charming little Canadian river town that is home to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The people are friendly, the houses pretty, the food fabulous, and we’re staying at a six-room downtown boutique hotel called Xis that is all but unimprovable. The décor is modern but comfortable, while the staff is wonderfully attentive without being oppressive. Nor can I imagine a tastier continental breakfast than the one served here each morning, which features fresh fruit, homemade granola, local bread, and two kinds of cheese. If only there were a rowing machine in the basement, Xis would be perfect.

Stratford, much to my surprise, looks rather like Smalltown, U.S.A., surrounded as it is by vast expanses of flat farm country. What sets it apart from Smalltown, of course, is that it is the home of one of North America’s biggest drama festivals–there are four full-scale theaters in town–which explains why a semi-rural community should be home to boutique hotels and four-star restaurants, and why the Stratford Police Pipes and Drums should have turned out in fully bekilted force to serenade playgoers en route to the festival’s opening night, a red-carpet event that caused a lot of respectable-looking gentlemen to pull their tuxes out of mothballs.

This is the first time I’ve been to Canada in years, and I spent the whole of my previous visit at a friend’s summer house, so I’ve been walking around town each afternoon in search of impressions. Mostly I’m struck by how similar Canada is to America–and how intensely aware it is of its neighbor to the south. While I have no doubt that surface appearances are deceiving, it’s also true that every other story I read in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, is either about the United States or makes prominent reference to it. I’ve yet to hear anything like a regional accent, and though one local restaurant claims to serve “world-famous Chinese and Canadian food,” the only evidence I’ve seen to date of a distinctively indigenous cuisine is the van parked a block from Xis that sells nothing but French fries and what Canadians call “pop.”

The main thing I’ve noticed since arriving on Sunday is that everyone here seems to be nice. Granted, I’ve yet to meet a Canadian I didn’t like, but the unfailing agreeability of the people whom I’ve encountered in Stratford suggests that niceness might well be a component of the Canadian national character. Between this visit and my 2008 encounter with the writing of Hugh MacLennan, I’m increasingly inclined to think that I ought to consider spending more time in Canada.

Might a visit to the Shaw Festival be in my future? Not this summer, alas–my dance card filled up months ago–but don’t be surprised if I head north again next year. I like it here.

The only surviving recording of H.L. Mencken’s voice, made at the Library of Congress in 1948:

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

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Apropos of my posting about President Obama’s visit to New York to see August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I received the following e-mail from a New York drama critic who shall remain nameless:

I find it sad that your massive ideological blinders prevent you from applauding the fact that a sitting president recognizes theater–never mind if it’s Broadway or a regional venue–as a worthy form of entertainment. If Bush, during one of his two terms, had attended a Broadway show, I can’t imagine you cobbling together this caviling post.
Or maybe you can explain to me how Bush promoted art in America, not simply fear and militarism.

To gratuitously impugn the motives of those with whom you disagree is the height of vulgarity. In this case, it’s also ignorant:
• I am, as anyone who knows my work is well aware, a constant and passionate advocate for American regional theater. That alone should be enough to explain why I wrote what I did.
• President Obama, so far as I know, has yet to attend a play in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital and a major center of regional theater.
• I didn’t mention it in my original posting because I haven’t seen it, but Studio Theatre, one of Washington’s very best drama companies, is currently performing Radio Golf, August Wilson’s last play.
• My posting, needless to say, had nothing to do with President Bush, but I do think it worth pointing out that he put Dana Gioia, a poet of the highest distinction, in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts. Among countless other worthy things, Dana launched Shakespeare in American Communities, a program whose long-range impact on the American theater community–not just in New York, but in every part of the country–will doubtless prove to be vastly more significant than that of President Obama’s decision to take his wife to a Broadway show. (For what it’s worth, President Bush also appointed me to the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s civilian review panel.)
So who’s wearing ideological blinders?

“I very much disapprove of the adage that you have to feel the performance completely every night on the stage. This is technically an impossibility, and really is the negation of the art of acting. The art of acting, after all, is not actual feeling but simulation of feeling, and it is impossible to feel a strong emotional part eight performances a week, including two matinées.”
Noël Coward, “The Art of Acting” (The Listener, Oct. 12, 1961)

President Obama’s trip to Broadway to see August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is reported to have cost the American taxpayer some $24,000, a statistic that did not escape the watchful eye of his political enemies. Says Gail Gitcho, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee: “If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn’t the presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?”
Speaking as the Wall Street Journal drama critic who declared Joe Turner to be “a show you must see,” I’m delighted that the first couple took my advice. Speaking as the Wall Street Journal drama critic who believes that the best American regional theater is directly comparable in quality to anything on or off Broadway, I can’t help but wish that the Obamas had chosen instead to boost the local product by seeing Arcadia, Giant, or any of the other first-rate shows that have been playing in and around Washington, D.C., in recent weeks.
Everyone in Washington knows about Broadway, but comparatively few New Yorkers (and surprisingly few Washingtonians) are aware that the nation’s capital also happens to be one of the best theater towns in America. I hope that the president and his wife will help to publicize that happy fact the next time they feel like spending a night on the town.
UPDATE: A friend writes:

But isn’t it great that he supported a classic by an American playwright who wrote about American history? Well, I think so.

And so do I–but all things being equal, I also think that regional theater is more deserving of presidential patronage than theater on Broadway. In any case, politicians are in the business of balancing competing goods!

The Letter continues to move smoothly toward its July 25 opening night in Santa Fe. So far the only bump in the road has been a last-minute cast change that caused a certain amount of inescapable anxiety, though Paul Moravec and I now expect the outcome to be wholly gratifying. What’s more, our first opera is starting to stir up buzz in the small world of high culture. The June issue of Opera News and the May/June issue of Opera Now both contain flattering articles about The Letter (neither, alas, available on line as yet, though we’re hoping).
The Opera News piece, written by Barry Singer, goes into detail about an aspect of The Letter of which Paul and I are especially proud:

Though Santa Fe’s commission was initiated two years ago, The Letter now stands as an unexpected object lesson for navigating opera’s impecunious future. Clocking in at a mere ninety minutes in length (divided into eight scenes), with a cast of seven principals, plus supernumeraries and choristers totaling nineteen in number, The Letter cost a relatively meager $2 million and change to bring to the stage.
“It now can be done again and again,” acknowledges Charles MacKay, Santa Fe’s new general director, who inherited The Letter from his predecessor, Richard Gaddes. “It sure is a blessing for me–and such an intimate scale will enable other companies to do it too, in time. Extravaganzas like [John Corigliano’s] Ghosts of Versailles don’t have that chance. They’re hostages to fortune.”

Needless to say, neither of us foresaw that the American economy would tank when we started planning The Letter in the summer of 2006, but our decision to keep our first opera lean and mean is looking more prescient by the day.
Paul and I also turned up in a preview piece about summer classical-music festivals that ran in the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago. And Opera Today, an online magazine, ran a flattering profile of Anthony Michaels-Moore, one of the stars of The Letter, that sheds further light on the kind of opera that we sought to write:

Moravec has written a lot of orchestral and chamber music but this is his first opera, and he wanted to involve his singers from the start. Michaels-Moore (who sings regularly at the Met) met the composer in New York, who asked him what he particularly liked in the music he sang. “Right!” said Moravec, “we’ll do it that way.” Because he writes with the singers, details can be tweaked and adapted, even in rehearsal. It’s very creative. Moravec also consulted Patricia Racette, who will sing Leslie Crosbie, the scheming wife. The result is an opera which “sings” well, and is user-friendly in performance. This could make it a regular part of the repertoire.

As for Opera, England’s highbrow opera monthly, the July issue will contain an essay called “Making an Opera Noir” in which I revisit some of the ideas that I’ve been discussing in this space since I started blogging about The Letter two years ago:

I enjoy many kinds of operas, including some, like Capriccio, Four Saints in Three Acts, and The Midsummer Marriage, that are not at all like The Letter. But The Letter is the kind of opera that Paul and I both wanted to write, a taut, compact repertory-style melodrama devoid of Big Ideas–the passionate emotions of the characters are its subject matter–that is aimed not at connoisseurs or intellectuals but at ordinary operagoers.

All this publicity notwithstanding, I don’t think that I’ve fully taken in the fact that The Letter will be opening in just fifty-five days, and I doubt that it will seem completely real to me until I fly to Santa Fe on July 12 to attend the last two weeks of rehearsals.
To be sure, I’ve already written an essay called “A Critic Takes a Bow” for the July/August issue of Commentary in which I speculate on the effect that writing The Letter will have on my work as a drama critic:

The practical lessons that I have already learned from writing an opera libretto are likely to stay with me for a very long time, and I expect to learn even more about what the playwright Alan Ayckbourn has called “the crafty art of playmaking” as I watch The Letter take shape in Santa Fe later this month.
Above all, though, I will learn how it feels to go in front of an audience and solicit its approval, and I may well find out what it feels like not to get it. Either way, I will surely come home a wiser man–and, I hope, a better critic.

So I hope! But the truth, of course, is that I won’t really know what it feels like to put a brand-new work of art in front of an audience until the fateful day when I pass through the stage door of the Santa Fe Opera, step in front of the footlights, and face a theater packed full of people who paid good money to see The Letter. Will they cheer? Will they boo?
Right now I’m too busy with Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and my theater-related travels for The Wall Street Journal to lose much sleep over The Letter–but I expect that to change as July 25 draws nearer. Any artist who tells you that he’s serenely indifferent to such matters is a liar.