Archives for 2009

“But to those who are accustomed to listen for it, the voice of conscience is not easily silenced; it goes on mumbling even if it cannot find anything to say.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

“In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy’s hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor. This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world–a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“I associate chronic boredom with narcissism, ingratitude and poverty of imagination.”
Patrick Kurp, Anecdotal Evidence, May 15, 2009

In the latest of my Wall Street Journal reports from the road, I review Main Street Theater’s revival of Awake and Sing! in Houston and Theatre Three’s revival of Lost in the Stars in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Why is Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” performed so rarely? It’s one of the greatest of all American plays, a wrenching kitchen-sink drama of Depression-era family life, and by all rights it ought to be as popular as “Our Town” or “The Glass Menagerie.” But revivals of “Awake and Sing!” are few and far between–Lincoln Center Theater’s 2006 production was the first time the show had been done on Broadway since 1984–which is why I flew to Houston to see a new staging of an un­derappreciated masterpiece….
The special excellence of “Awake and Sing!” lies not in its standard-issue plot, whose climax is frankly melodramatic, but in Odets’s golden ear for the tangy, Yiddish-flavored everyday speech of the Russian-Jewish immigrant community into which he, like the Bergers, was born. It’s as though he’d spent his childhood with a notebook in his hand, scribbling down homely phrases that he would later use with the lapidary exactitude of a poet (“Never mind laughing. It’s time you already had in your head a serious thought”). Not until August Wilson came along a half-century later would an American playwright make such effective use of the language of the streets on which he grew up.
I confess to not having expected a stageful of Houston-based actors to speak Odets’s dialogue with the idiomatic snap that you’d take for granted from a New York cast. Was I wrong! Not only is Main Street Theater’s ensemble cast at home with every line, but they put across the play’s angry warmth so believably that you’d think you were sitting at the table with them….
Today Kurt Weill is mainly remembered for “The Threepenny Opera,” but in his lifetime he was best known for the musicals that he wrote after he immigrated to America in 1935 and retrofitted himself as a Broadway songsmith. Yet none of them has been successfully revived in New York, and Theatre Three’s production of “Lost in the Stars,” Weill’s 1949 musical version of Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” appears to be the first full-scale staging of that show to be seen anywhere in the past two decades. I wondered whether a 60-year-old musical about life under apartheid would make sense in the 21st century, but “Lost in the Stars” proves to be a fresh and compelling piece of work that is long overdue for a second chance on Broadway.
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Read the whole thing here.

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

I know my limits, and I reached them on Monday and acted accordingly. Instead of driving around Dallas in search of cultural experiences and/or barbecue, I spent the day in my hotel room, emerging only to eat breakfast, visit the fitness center, and go to Theatre Three that evening to see the rare revival of Lost in the Stars, Kurt Weill’s musical version of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, that had brought me to town. The fact that it was Monday, meaning that the museums were closed, prevented me from zooming off to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, which I would doubtless have felt obliged to do on any other day of the week.
On Tuesday I behaved only slightly less prudently, flying to Kansas City in the morning and going straight from the airport to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is in the same neighborhood as my hotel and the theater where the Kansas City Repertory Theatre is performing David Ives’ new version of Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear. My plan was to visit the museum just long enough to get a look at the exhibition of American art on paper that went up last month. Alas, nobody told me that the Nelson-Atkins is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays! Fortuitously stymied, I drove to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon on my back, giving myself just enough time to dine at Winstead’s before reporting to the theater at six-forty-five.
Yesterday was…well, let’s just say it was long. Or maybe looong would be a better way to put it. I got up in the morning, wrote and filed my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, then drove three hundred and seventy-nine miles to Smalltown, U.S.A., where my mother was standing in the doorway, beaming like a searchlight.
Yes, I have a couple of reviews to write while I’m here, but insofar as it’s possible for me to drop the reins, I plan to do so between now and next Tuesday, when I fly back to Washington, D.C., to see Design for Living. Pops is finished and The Letter out of my hands, both of which should make it easier for me to relax. I promised my mother that I’d take her on a picnic, and I promised Mrs. T that I’d sleep late every day. Never let it be said that I’m not a man of my word!
(To be continued)

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)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (drama, PG-13, some adult subject matter, accessible to adolescents with mature attention spans, closes June 14, reviewed here)

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

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests * (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

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

• Waiting for Godot * (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, closes July 12, 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)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes June 28, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO

• Old Times (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN ARLINGTON, VA.:

• Giant (musical, PG-13, far too long for children, closes May 31, reviewed here)

GUILDENSTERN: You!–What do you know about death?
PLAYER KING: It’s what the actors do best. They have to exploit whatever talent is given to them, and their talent is dying. They can die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height. My own talent is more general. I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead