Archives for 2009

Each day I receive a Google Alert e-mail on Louis Armstrong, and each day I wonder as I read it whether someone somewhere has discovered a primary source that contradicts something I’ve written in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. So far, so good, but I got a bit nervous over the weekend when I learned that a hitherto-unknown sixteen-page letter written by Armstrong to Mezz Mezzrow in 1932 was being auctioned off by the same firm that’s currently selling private tapes of Barbra Streisand’s 1960 nightclub debut.
The complete text of the letter can be viewed on line. I was relieved to learn upon reading it that I won’t have to tear up Pops at the very last minute in order to shoehorn the letter into the book. Even so, I wish I’d known about it six months ago, for the letter, which Armstrong wrote midway through his first trip to England, fills in several small but significant factual gaps in our knowledge of that important episode in his life. It is also, like all of Armstrong’s letters, written in an amazingly vivid and personal style:

The Victor Record Co., has just won the case from the Okeh Record Co. and wired Mr. Collins [Johnny Collins, Armstrong’s manager] that all’s well and I can start on my new Victor contract which replaces the Rudy Vallee anytime. Gee, Gate, what a victory that is to win from our boy Rockwell [Tommy Rockwell, Armstrong’s previous manager, who sued to stop him from switching record labels]. Looka heah, Looka heah. Now just watch those good royalties-dividends-shares-‘n’ everything else. Ha. Ha. And the contract pop’s (MR. COLLINS) made with these people for me, why you’ve never heard of one like it before. And that includes the ole King of Jazz himself Paul Whiteman. Nice, eh?

Alas, you won’t find that paragraph in Pops, nor has it been published anywhere else, though I sincerely hope that a complete run of Armstrong’s surviving correspondence will be brought out in book form at some point in the future. (In the meantime, a fair number of his letters can be found here.) Until then I’ll be keeping an eye on Google–and hoping that nothing of indispensable importance surfaces for at least another six months, if not longer.

Mrs. T and I are going to the beach today, and we won’t be back until Wednesday evening. I plan to check my e-mail very sporadically between now and then. If you really, truly need to get in touch with me…good luck.

“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

I’m still on the road in New England, where I reviewed the Peterborough Players’ Heartbreak House in New Hampshire and the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Ghosts in Stockbridge. Both productions are excellent, but only one of these two classic plays of Vicwardian manners remains viable today. Here’s an excerpt.
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You can tell any truth, however hurtful, so long as you say it with a smile. That was the secret of George Bernard Shaw’s success, and “Heartbreak House” shows his method at its most theatrically effective. Rarely have England’s chattering classes been sketched so savagely, but Shaw tells his brutal truths with such impish charm that you scarcely feel the knife slipping in until the blood starts to flow. Therein lies the strength of the Peterborough Players’ production of “Heartbreak House,” which Gus Kaikkonen has staged with the lightest possible touch. It plays like a Noël Coward-style comedy of bad manners–until the climactic moment when the ground opens up beneath the feet of the characters.
Written between 1913 and 1919 and set in the first days of World War I, “Heartbreak House” takes place in the country home of Captain Shotover (George Morfogen), a retired sailor of great age who has the alarming habit of popping into a room, saying whatever happens to be on his mind, then popping out again. The captain and his family seem at first glance to be charming to a fault, a veritable fountain of epigrammatic cleverness. One of their guests describes them as “unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.” Yet mere minutes after these words are spoken, the Shotovers find themselves in the midst of a German aerial bombardment, and they rejoice in the devastation that threatens to consume them and the rest of their delightful kind….
Every member of Mr. Kaikkonen’s ensemble cast gives a sharply and memorably drawn performance, starting with Mr. Morfogen, whose Captain Shotover is a fey, shambling sprite…
As a critic, Shaw championed the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and as a playwright he learned from Ibsen’s willingness to skewer the hypocrisies of the 19th-century middle class about which he wrote. Yet Shaw was the better artist, and I don’t doubt that he knew it. In “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” his 1891 tribute to the man who cleared the way for his own plays of ideas, Shaw described Ibsen’s “Ghosts” as “such an uncompromising and outspoken attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice to an ideal, that his meaning was obscured by its very obviousness.” I thought of those backhanded words of praise as I watched the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s imaginative revival of “Ghosts.” In 1881 “Ghosts” swept across the stage like a tornado of frankness, but today it comes across as a preachy piece of bourgeois-baiting…
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Read the whole thing here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The coming of television killed off network radio in a way that’s startlingly reminiscent of the effect that the digital revolution is currently having on network TV, the print media, and the music business.
Are there any useful lessons to be learned from what happened to old-time network radio in the quarter-century that preceded its final demise in 1962? I think so, and I’ve tried to sum them up in my latest “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That’s the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin….

Can the old media shore up their questionable future by looking to the not-quite-so-distant past? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

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)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Camelot (musical, G, closes Sept. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS:

• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PITTSFIELD, MASS:

• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13/R, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)