Archives for December 2009

In today’s Wall Street Journal, several of the paper’s columnists were asked to sum up and reflect on developments in their fields of interest during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Art and culture being my beat, I wrote what may seem at first glance like a paradoxical-sounding piece about the absence of trends in the ’00s:

The most significant cultural development of the first decade of the 21st century was…iTunes. Or the Kindle. Or YouTube. Or blogging. Or Amazon’s customer reviews. Take your pick–but whatever you choose, don’t make it a work of creative art. Yes, important art continued to be created in the new millennium, but the big culture-related news of the Decade Without a Name is that it will likely be remembered less for its art than for the inventions that put the art into circulation.
Every journalist who covers the world of art and culture is a trend-monger, always looking for the Next Big Thing like a pig snuffling for truffles. But never before has it been so difficult to point to any sharply defined stylistic tendencies in Western culture….

Read the whole thing here.

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (Nov. 10, 1750)

Somehow or other I’ve managed to keep up with my regular writing for The Wall Street Journal while barnstorming on behalf of Pops, though both of this week’s columns were written not at my desk in New York but in a Chicago hotel room. I hope the quality didn’t suffer!
In today’s Journal I review two New York shows, the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music and the second installment of Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle. The first is disappointing despite occasional bright spots, the second…well, read for yourself. Here’s an excerpt.
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How is it possible that “A Little Night Music” is now being seen for the first time on Broadway since the original production closed there in 1974? It is without doubt one of Stephen Sondheim’s greatest achievements, a musical version of Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night” that comes close to surpassing in quality the worldly-wise comedy of upper-class manners on which it is based. “A Little Night Music” is revived often by regional theaters around the country, and one can never see it often enough, even in a production that fails to bring out its myriad beauties.
I’m sorry to say that such is the case with Trevor Nunn’s small-scale staging of “A Little Night Music,” which has just transferred to Broadway from London’s West End. Despite a good cast and a great set, Mr. Nunn gets the tone of the show dead wrong, and the presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, though it will undoubtedly keep “A Little Night Music” running for some time to come, doesn’t make up for his blunders. Above all, Mr. Nunn has made the fatal mistake of favoring Hugh Wheeler’s coarsely farce-flavored book over Mr. Sondheim’s sublimely urbane score. As a result, everything about this production feels exaggerated and overplayed. The staging is fussily detailed (though some of the details are quite striking) and most of the performances are heavy-handed in a way which clearly indicates that the director, not the actors, is at fault.
Ms. Zeta-Jones plays Desirée, the aging actress who longs for a quieter love life, with a flamboyance that too often lapses into crassness. That she is capable of much better things is obvious from her tender, deeply musical singing of “Send in the Clowns” and the grace with which she and Alexander Hanson play the last scene, which leads me to suspect that Mr. Nunn egged her on elsewhere….
The second part of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” Horton Foote’s family album of plays about a turn-of-the-century Texas family and its struggles with the coming of modernity, has just opened at Signature Theatre Company. It upholds the immeasurably bright promise of the first installment. Not since Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” has so self-evidently significant a large-scale theatrical endeavor come to New York….
Much of the play takes place on front porches, and much of the talk overheard there will remind you of a line from James Agee’s “A Death in the Family”: “They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.” But don’t be deceived by the uneventfulness of “The Story of a Marriage,” a play about nothing that turns out to have been about everything: love, loss, death, hope….
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Read the whole thing here.

The Wall Street Journal is running its end-of-the-year critical summings-up early because of the way the holidays fall, which is why I hold forth in this morning’s paper on the best–and worst–shows and performances that I saw in 2009.
Regular readers of my drama column won’t be surprised to learn that David Cromer, the director of the extraordinary off-Broadway revival of Our Town, is prominently featured therein:

All of which brings us to the best shows of 2009, both of which were revivals that opened out of town and were staged by the same man. On Broadway, David Cromer is currently known as the victim-in-chief of “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” which he directed (and very well, too) in his Broadway debut. Fortunately, he will be remembered far longer for the Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which originated in Chicago, and the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s staging of “The Glass Menagerie.” The first of these shows has already made theatrical history: on December 16 it became the longest-running production of “Our Town” in history. I wish “The Glass Menagerie” had transferred to New York and run at least as long. Mr. Cromer has the uncanny ability to take a familiar script and make it seem wholly new–yet it is his great gift to serve the plays that he directs, rather than bending them out of shape. Such, I believe, is the essence of recreative genius, and David Cromer has it in spades….

Also singled out for praise in my column are a couple of dozen other shows and performers, including Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger, Paper Mill Playhouse’s On the Town, Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night, The History Boys at Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre…but why not just go here and read the whole thing?

“If any man hunger, let him eat at home.”
1 Corinthians 11:34 (King James version)

Today I’m headed for New Orleans, though my first event there, oddly enough, isn’t a local one: I’ll be talking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by phone from New Orleans with David Inge of Focus 580, broadcast live each morning over WILL-AM, the radio station of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tune to 580 on your AM dial to hear me live starting at 11:06 a.m. CT, or go here to listen on your computer via streaming audio.
For those of you who live in or near New Orleans, I’ll be speaking about Pops at the Garden District Bookshop, 2727 Prytania Street, starting at 5:30 p.m. Go here for more details.
I have one more event in New Orleans on Friday morning: I’ll be talking about Pops on WWL-TV, Channel 4, at 8:15 a.m. CT. After that I fly up to St. Louis, meet Mrs. T at the Amtrak station, and drive down to Smalltown, U.S.A., for the holidays. Yes, I plan to ease off on the blogging next week–I need a bit of rest–but there’ll still be something new to amuse you every day in this space.
Just in case you’re wondering, I’ll be eating red beans and rice tonight!
UPDATE: Actually, I had them for lunch. Satchmo, who liked to sign his letters “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” would have been pleased.

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)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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, 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:

• 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, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Biography (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

• The Starry Messenger (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.”
Leigh Hunt, The Indicator