Archives for 2009

I arrived in Santa Fe early yesterday evening, dropped my bags at the rented condo where I’ll be spending the next three weeks, called Mrs. T and my mother to let them know that I was in one piece, then went off to dinner with Paul Moravec, composer of The Letter, which opens in twelve days.

My trip began with a short working holiday: I flew to Los Angeles and spent two nights in the improbably beautiful Topanga Canyon. I saw a pair of plays at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum and stayed at the Tuscali Mountain Inn, an idyllic hillside retreat located a mere quarter-mile from the theater. The hosts are friendly, the food tasty, the furnishings elegant (a Picasso etching was hung next to my desk), the beds comfortable. The last of these was more important than usual: I was greatly in need of sleep, and got plenty of it.

As for Paul, he made it to Santa Fe a week ago and has been reporting to me by phone twice daily about the rehearsals. I grew more excited each time I spoke to him. Now the wait is over. I’m here. It’s happening. Later this morning I’ll drive to the Santa Fe Opera to attend my first rehearsal. Paul has already told me what to expect: “It’s overwhelming, hearing it being performed for real. You’ll feel the same way when you get here. You’ll want to cry.” I’m sure he’s right—I’ve always been an easy weeper—but once the shock wave has rolled over me, I have no doubt that the press of work will pull me to my feet again. I doubt I’m going to have much time to feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sensation of seeing and hearing my words and Paul’s music sung by performers on a stage.

A year and a half ago, Paul and I attended the third New York screening of the film version of Sweeney Todd, a work that influenced us deeply in writing The Letter. As I wrote in this space at the time:

Halfway throught he film, in the brief pause between “Epiphany” and “A Little Priest,” I leaned over to Paul and whispered, “This is the mark we have to hit.” He nodded.

On the street afterward, I said, “Inspiring, huh?”

Paul grinned. “The work waits…and I’m full of joy,” he replied. Then he disappeared into the night.

That goes octuple today.


”You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson

The Letter opens in fifteen days. This morning I fly to the West Coast (again!) to see two shows at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum. On Sunday I’ll travel from Los Angeles to Santa Fe via Albuquerque, and from then until July 25 I’ll devote virtually the whole of my time and energy to my first opera. Not all: I’ll have to write three pieces while I’m in Santa Fe. Such is the life of a working journalist. But most of my Wall Street Journal copy is already filed and edited in advance for the next three weeks, and I’m going to do my damnedest to finish writing the rest of it before I hit town.
No, it doesn’t seem real–not quite, not yet. I’ve been exchanging several phone calls each day with Paul Moravec, who’s already out in Santa Fe helping to rehearse The Letter, but I still can’t believe it’s really, truly happening, no doubt because I haven’t seen it yet. That comes when I report to the Santa Fe Opera House on Monday. I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to blog and tweet about what I see there, but don’t be surprised if I dry up for a day or two out of sheer excitement. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I can’t wait for it to start.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, where I saw Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing. Here’s an excerpt.
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Hardly anybody does “Pericles,” which was staged just once in the 19th century and remains to this day the least well known of Shakespeare’s plays. If you want to embarrass a critic, ask him to summarize the plot and watch him start stammering. (It’s happened to me!) Now that the recession has caused American theater companies to pull in their horns and play it safe, revivals have become scarcer still. All the more reason, then, to laud the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival for taking a chance on “Pericles,” and to praise Terrence O’Brien, the festival’s artistic director, for giving it a staging so lucid, genial and persuasive that you’ll go home wondering why it isn’t as popular as “Twelfth Night.”
The trouble with “Pericles” is that it lacks the inexorable momentum of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays, which hurtle toward their denouements like bullets toward the bull’s-eye. Not so this sprawling tale of a Phoenician prince who wanders from adventure to adventure, driven by the lash of increasingly implausible coincidence and the skullduggery of the 60-odd characters who share the stage with him. Yes, there’s a plot, but it’s so loosely knit that Shakespeare launches each act with a prologue whose sole purpose is to keep the audience in the picture. By the time Pericles is finally reunited with his long-lost wife and daughter, you’ll probably have forgotten how they disappeared in the first place.
How can a modern-day director bring “Pericles” into focus? By simultaneously playing its absurdities with tongue in cheek and taking its serious moments seriously. That, at any rate, is Mr. O’Brien’s approach, and it works perfectly. He gives us, among other delightful things, pirates with avast-me-hearties accents and funky dances complete with lip-synching–yet everyone in his 19-member cast is capable of turning on a dime and speaking Shakespeare’s verse sweetly and sonorously whenever the situation calls for eloquence….
John Christian Plummer’s staging of “Much Ado About Nothing” is no less typical of the Hudson Valley approach. Instead of coming up with an over-elaborate directorial concept that obscures the plain meaning of the text, Mr. Plummer is content to cloak his well-chosen cast in a riotous medley of mismatched costumes, some of which look as though they came from the cantina scene in “Star Wars” and the rest from “Only Angels Have Wings.” The rest he leaves to the actors, and in particular to Nance Williamson and Jason O’Connell, who play Beatrice and Benedick, the reluctant lovers, as well as I’ve seen them played….
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Read the whole thing here.

June 20 marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the original theatrical release of Chinatown, for me the best American film of the Seventies. I also think that Jerry Goldsmith’s score, which lost out at the Oscars to The Godfather, Part II, is one of the half-dozen best film scores of the twentieth century. Many people know that it was written under severe time pressure, but few know the full story of how Goldsmith was brought in at the last minute to compose a new score for Chinatown. In this week’s “Sightings” column I tell that story, and pay tribute to one of the best pieces of postwar American music–regardless of genre.
To find out more, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-too-Human

Several interesting features to this story about Playboy‘s acquiring rights to run an excerpt from Nabokov’s The Original of Laura. That the New Yorker passed on the rights (!). The degree to which Playboy pitched some serious woo to gain them, including the dispatch of fresh orchids to the Wylie Agency offices. And that Playboy was asked to make an offer without having seen the manuscript — and did. The magazine’s literary editor Amy Grace Loyd is quoted as saying, “I knew because of Nabokov’s genius, even if the manuscript was even more messy than it actually is, I would probably still be content.”
For those of you who haven’t been following this saga: The Original of Laura is the manuscript Nabokov left unfinished at his death, in 1977. He requested that it be destroyed. It wasn’t. And now after some public hand-wringing and a lapse of a little more than three decades, the work will be published by Knopf on Nov. 17 — with suitably somber cover art by Chip Kidd. The 5,000-word excerpt runs in Playboy‘s December issue (out Nov. 10), accompanied by what one imagines will be less somber cover art.
So how good can we expect The Original of Laura to be? Wikipedia’s thorough entry on the novel shows only a small circle of people have read it (or had excerpts read to them), and bits and pieces of the manuscript have appeared in a couple magazines. But the most promising mention I’ve yet come across is contained in a letter written by Dmitri Nabokov to the National Review in 1987. The letter, a point-by-point rebuttal of claims made by critic-biographer Andrew Field in his V.N.: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, ends with a denial of Field’s characterization of the end of Nabokov’s life as marked by “heavy drinking” and “decline”. Dmitri writes:

[T]he decline Field invents presumably encompasses such petits riens as Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins, and The Original of Laura, which was interrupted by Nabokov’s death and promised to be one of his most brilliant and original works (for the time being, my word will have to be taken for that).”

Intriguing, right?

Yes, I’m mostly thinking about the premiere of The Letter on July 25, but I haven’t lost sight of the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on December 2. The good news is that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is planning to send me on a multi-city book tour, and several dates have already been confirmed.
Here are the places where I’ll definitely be speaking:
• The Boston Athenaeum on December 3.
• The Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble on December 7.
• The Los Angeles Public Library on December 8.
• Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library on December 9.
• The Philadelphia Free Library on December 10.
In addition, there’s a good chance that I’ll be speaking in Washington, D.C., on January 6–no details yet, though.
Needless to say, watch this space for further information and additional tour dates in other cities.
As for The Letter, the Santa Fe Opera has now posted an online schedule of events related to the upcoming premiere, including various public appearances that Paul Moravec and I will be making. If you’re coming to Santa Fe to see the show, go here to find out what else you can do.