Archives for 2009

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong has been picked for the December Indie Next Great Reads List, a monthly list of twenty new books recommended by the American Booksellers Association to its member stores. Here’s a sneak peek at the Indie Next capsule review of Pops, which was written by James Wilson of Octavia Books in New Orleans:

Terry Teachout has written an amazing biography of New Orleans’ native son Louis Armstrong. Drawing on newly available primary sources, he weaves together a biography that is both illuminating and inspirational. Armstrong’s contributions to jazz, pop culture, and breaking the color barrier are well told in a crisp, clean prose. Highly recommended!

High and gratifying praise indeed, coming as it does from the birthplace of jazz.
Go here to see the rest of the December list.

Mrs. T and I recently got around to watching Turner Classic Movies’ Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me, a Clint Eastwood-produced two-hour documentary full of priceless archival footage. It’s being telecast in honor of the upcoming centennial of the birth of the author of the lyrics (and, on occasion, the music) to such classic songs as “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Blues in the Night,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Early Autumn,” “Emily,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “I Remember You,” “I Thought About You,” “I Wonder What Became of Me,” “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Laura,” “Moon River,” “One for My Baby,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Skylark,” and “That Old Black Magic.”

Though Mercer is my favorite lyricist, I didn’t write anything about The Dream’s on Me because I’d already said what I had to say about him in “Too Marvelous for Words,” an essay that I published in Commentary in 1994. Here is part of that piece, which has never been collected or reprinted since its original appearance.

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Mercer’s brand of lyricism–unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication–is unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like “Skylark” (1942): Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won’t you tell me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone’s waiting to be kissed? In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity….

Mercer was one of the few major American songwriters who were not big-city Easterners–he came from Savannah, Georgia–and to some extent his style reflects this difference of cultural background. At the same time, though, he was more than a homespun versifier who just happened to write popular songs. His creative impulse, unlike that of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter, was essentially lyrical, and this quality intensified as he grew older–so much so that in such later songs as “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962), the melody, memorable though it may be, is not needed in order to heighten the poetic quality of the words: The days of wine and roses/Laugh and run away,/Like a child at play,/Through the meadowland toward a closing door,/A door marked “Nevermore,”/That wasn’t there before….

Gene Lees paradoxically asserts that Mercer “was more than a poet, he was a lyricist.” Like all paradoxes, this one sheds light without offering a definitive answer to the question it implies. My own published view, if less suggestive, has the virtue of being more clear-cut:

For all the utilitarian considerations that brought [his songs] into being, their aesthetic appeal is considerable, and the more I reflect on Mercer’s achievement, the more I am inclined to think that he deserves to be considered not merely as a writer of supremely well-crafted song lyrics, but as one of the most gifted poets this country has produced.

Continued immersion in and reflection on Mercer’s work has done nothing to change my opinion–though I would hasten to add that even his most frankly poetic lyrics are best heard in tandem with the melodies that inspired them. Hence they occupy the same equivocal position as, say, Bernard Herrmann’s film scores, which are the products of a collaborative process and cannot be properly evaluated outside the context of that process. It is revealing that Mercer published no poetry, presumably because he felt he had no gift for writing it. Only in the crucible of collaboration did his talents manifest themselves completely.

Does this diminish the significance of his achievement? Must he necessarily be considered a lesser artist than a writer who works exclusively on his own? To make such a claim, after all, is by extension to relegate all forms of collaborative art to a lower level of excellence simply because of the process by which they came into being. Is Citizen Kane an inferior work because Orson Welles created it in collaboration with Herrmann, the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the cinematographer Gregg Toland? Conversely, is Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean?” a better song than “Days of Wine and Roses” simply by virtue of the fact that Berlin wrote both words and music?

For me, the answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no–but whether or not that makes Johnny Mercer a true poet is another matter, and one about which he himself had nothing to say. Perhaps, though, one might look to one of his own lyrics, “One for My Baby,” for an answer:

You’d never know it,
But buddy, I’m a kind of poet,
And I’ve gotta lotta things to say.
And when I’m gloomy,
You simply gotta listen to me,
Until it’s talked away.

Who can doubt that the man who wrote these lines was at the very least “a kind of poet”? Or that the world will continue to listen to the things he had to say long after most of the full-fledged “poets” of our own day are dead and forgotten?

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The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, a handsome coffee-table book that reprints all of Mercer’s lyrics, has just been published by Knopf.

Mosaic Select: Johnny Mercer, a three-CD box set, contains seventy-nine of the recordings that Mercer made as a singer between 1942 and 1947 for Capitol Records, the label that he co-founded.

Mercer also makes a cameo appearance on the version of “Lazy River” recorded by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong in 1960 for their only duet album, Bing & Satchmo. (You can download “Lazy River” individually from Amazon or iTunes.)

My favorite album of Mercer’s songs is Nancy LaMott’s Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer.

“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?”
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

I review two off-Broadway shows, The Understudy and Nightingale, in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is great fun, the second so-so. Here’s an excerpt.
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I’ve been having trouble figuring out Theresa Rebeck–and I’ve had a lot of opportunities to try. She writes a new script (or two) every year, and most of her plays make it to New York sooner or later, which means that somebody out there must like them. Yet time and again Ms. Rebeck has served up the same disappointing dish, a smart, glib confection that starts off fresh, then goes flat at the halfway mark. So it’s both a delight and a relief to report that “The Understudy” is a raucously funny farce that makes it all the way to the finish line, though the two halves of the play, each of which is effective in its own right, don’t fit together, at least not neatly.
As the title suggests, Ms. Rebeck’s new play is a backstage comedy about a frustrated actor with highbrow tendencies (Justin Kirk) whose inability to get work leaves him with no choice but to take a job as understudy to Jake (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), a second-tier action-movie hero who is diversifying his resumé by appearing on Broadway in a previously unpublished play by Franz Kafka. (The “Kafka” play is actually by Ms. Rebeck, and it’s a hoot.) This being a farce, there’s a king-sized catch: Roxanne (Julie White), the stage manager, is also the ex-fianceé of Harry, the understudy, who left her at the altar six years before without warning, explanation or good reason….
Farce is the trickiest of theatrical genres, but the first half of “The Understudy” is a little masterpiece of comic clockwork in which the craziness mounts steadily from scene to scene….
Lynn Redgrave needs no endorsements from critics, least of all me. She is one of the greatest actors of her generation, and it is always a blessing to see her on stage, whatever the circumstances. They aren’t exactly propitious in “Nightingale,” her new one-woman play, a part-true, part-imagined portrait of her maternal grandmother into which Ms. Redgrave has also woven a strand of personal reminiscence….
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Read the whole thing here.

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The man who made The Letter possible died a few weeks ago, though the news has only just been released.
Lord Glendevon, who went by his given name of Julian Hope, was the grandson and literary executor of Somerset Maugham, who wrote the play on which Paul Moravec and I based our opera. He was a noted opera director in his own right, and so he was enormously encouraging when Paul and I first approached him about adapting The Letter.
Alas, I never met Julian, who was too ill to attend the premiere of The Letter in Santa Fe. Judging by his affectionate obituaries, I missed out on an exceedingly good thing.
Paul, who got to know Julian a bit, passes on this reminiscence:

I met Julian for dinner in New York a few years ago to discuss plans and rights for The Letter. As steward of the Maugham estate, he enthusiastically supported the project and granted permission generously and expeditiously. I liked him immensely. He was a person of unpretentious intelligence and elegant civility, a true gentleman. We stayed in touch by e-mail and telephone as the project evolved, and though I didn’t know him well, I still feel as though I’ve lost a good friend.

Would that I could say the same!

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway 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, reviewed here)

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

• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, 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 Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, extended through Dec. 6, 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)

“Not to go to the theatre is like making one’s toilet without a mirror.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paraliponema