Archives for November 2009

Like most mere mortals, I have the unfortunate habit of grousing about things for which I should by all rights be abjectly grateful. This has been a stressful and exhausting year, far too much of which I’ve had to spend in departure lounges and window seats, and there were a few times along the way when I wondered whether I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Yet I knew perfectly well that anyone who gets to publish his latest book, have his first opera premiered, and celebrate his second wedding anniversary–all in the space of twelve fast-moving months–has no business complaining about anything whatsoever. Today I’m as thankful as it’s possible to be, and I hope I have the good sense to remain so for some time to come.

I love the opening lines of My Favorite Year, Richard Benjamin’s movie about a young writer for a weekly TV series not unlike Your Show of Shows: “Nineteen fifty-four. You don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year.”

I hope I will always feel that way about 2009.

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The last scene of My Favorite Year:

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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)

• Finian’s Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

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

• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

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

• The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Part 1 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with second and third parts of cycle starting on Dec. 3 and Jan. 7 respectively, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• My Wonderful Day (farce, PG-13/R, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, then reopens Dec. 15 at the Soho Playhouse, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MILLBURN, N.J..:

• On the Town (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, reviewed here)

O Lord, that lends me life,

Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!

For thou hast given me in this beauteous face

A world of earthly blessings to my soul,

If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Paul Hindemith conducts the Chicago Symphony in the first movement of his Concert Music for Strings and Brass, Op. 50:

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

When I read the obituaries for Edward Woodward last week, my mind went back to an essay I wrote in 1986 about The Equalizer, the stylish TV series in which he starred a quarter-century ago. This piece, which appeared in National Review, was one of the first things I wrote for a magazine that I really liked, and I’ve no idea why I didn’t include it in the Teachout Reader.

I especially like this part:

Over a churning electronic soundtrack, we see a jerkily edited sequence of New York nightmares. A young woman unsuccessfully attempts to board a subway car at Columbus Circle and a punk slithers out from behind a column as the train pulls away. A man pounds frantically on the door of a telephone booth as a big black car screeches toward him. One stark image bears down savagely upon the next. All at once the soothing image of a man in deep shadow fills the screen. He is The Equalizer, the Nietzschean superman come to make safe the mean streets of the Big Apple….

The dream of the Übermensch as urban savior has always gone over big in America. Superman fantasies can be easily found in the hard-boiled detective novel, many of our movies, and most of our comic books. But television, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues, has generally preferred to let duly appointed authorities clean up the streets. It’s all right to be a maverick, a cop with an independent streak, but a current institutional affiliation in reasonably good standing is almost always a must. Shows that posit the helplessness of the police in the face of urban crime have never been popular on American television, which prefers to reassure rather than frighten. So it is intriguing that each episode of The Equalizer should enact the desperate notion that the center cannot hold without the occasional benign intervention of a fearless vigilante….

The show is clearly aimed at a sophisticated audience of baby-boomers, and the assumption that this audience would appreciate so straight-forwardly moralistic a denouement is a telling one. The baby-boomers, despite their notoriously touchy consciences, are still looking for simple answers to complex questions, and commercial television has long been in the business of supplying them. The Equalizer caters gracefully to subway-riding boomers who wonder nervously when their turn to be mugged will come up. Nothing stimulates the desire for order quite like advancing age.

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The opening title sequence to The Equalizer. The music is by Stewart Copeland:

“Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.”
Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

If you haven’t seen Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, go here to read it.
Not long after the Times review appeared on the paper’s Web site yesterday afternoon, Pops became the best-selling jazz book on Amazon. I don’t know how long it will stay that way, so if you haven’t gotten around to doing your bit, why wait? Christmas is just around the corner.
UPDATE: In addition to raving about “Pops” today, Kakutani has put it on her list of the ten best books of 2009.

• Jane Wilson, about whom I have written more than once in this space and elsewhere, has a show of new paintings and watercolors up at DC Moore Gallery through December 23. Busy as I am, I didn’t hesitate to carve out time to see it as soon as it opened, for Wilson is one of my favorite American artists. Imagine a cross between Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter and you’ll get an inkling of what Wilson is up to in her near-abstract yet miraculously specific skyscapes, in which the fleeting manifestations of clouds and light are refracted through the transforming prism of an artist’s eye. I can’t praise Wilson more highly than to say that one of her small-format watercolors, Breaking Light, hangs in the Teachout Museum. I look at it every day.
DC Moore is at 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. For more information, go here.
• Maria Schneider, the most gifted of contemporary jazz composers, brings her big band to the Jazz Standard tonight for their annual Thanksgiving residency. They’ll be there through Sunday, playing a mixture of old and new tunes, and what I wrote about them in 2007 still goes:

Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

No show on Thursday. Otherwise, two shows nightly, plus an additional late-night set on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are essential. For more information, go here.