Archives for February 2010

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:

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

• A View from the Bridge * (drama, PG-13, violence and some sexual content, closes Apr. 4, 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, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory, extended through May 8, reviewed here, here, and here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, sexual content, newly extended through Mar. 28, reviewed here)

IN FORT MYERS, FLA.:

• You Can’t Take It With You (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Feb. 26, reviewed here)

IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 13, reviewed here)

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (serious comedy, PG-13, far too complicated for children, closes Feb. 28, reviewed here)

“The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.”
Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent

Paul Robeson talks about playing the title role in Othello in 1943:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Every neurotic is partly in the right.”
Alfred Adler, Problems of Neurosis

• Patti Smith on Bolaño Bolaño Bolaño part 1 and part 2 .
• Werner Herzog talks about the blending of fact and fiction in his films:

Facts per se are not so interesting for me. Facts do not illuminate; they create norms. The Manhattan phone directory has 4 million entries which are factually correct, but as a book it doesn’t really illuminate you. I’ve always said we have to look beyond realism, beyond facts.

Earlier in the interview Herzog mentions that students at his Rogue Film School receive a “mandatory reading list” but alas no specific titles are mentioned. (Via.)

Our house is on the east side of Asheville, near the area known as Swannanoa. There’s a bluegrass song called “Swannanoa Tunnel” I like because it sounds like an aural transcription of the landscape around here: Winding, mountainous, gray-topped. I had thought the song was an instrumental but yesterday I came across a nice article, written by Lyle Lofgren and originally published in Inside Bluegrass, that contained lyrics for it. Lofgren notes that the song’s a variant on the work song “Nine Pound Hammer.” The Swannanoa iteration developed during the construction of the Swannanoa Tunnel, one of the railway tunnels that connected Asheville, then a raw scrap of city, to the rest of the country. Tunnel-digging was dangerous work. According to Lofgren, 300 men lost their lives during the project (another source places the number at 125).
As Lofgren recounts, the song was first transcribed by the Englishman Cecil Sharp and his protégé Maud Karpeles. But “[w]ithout a recording machine, they had to transcribe the words and tunes while people were singing them, and the North Carolina accents misled them badly on this song: ‘Tunnel’ became ‘town-o’ and ‘hoot owl’ was transcribed as ‘hoodow.'” (The two were also reportedly perplexed by the song’s oft-repeated chorus, “blinded by the light / wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night.”)
Here are the lyrics:

I’m going back to that Swannanoa Tunnel,
That’s my home, baby, that’s my home.
Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel,
All caved in, baby, all caved in.
Last December, I remember,
The wind blowed cold, baby, the wind blowed cold.
When you hear my watchdog howling, somebody around,
When you hear that hoot owl squalling, somebody dying,
Hammer falling from my shoulder all day long,
Ain’t no hammer in this mountain outrings mine
This old hammer, it killed John Henry, it didn’t kill me,
Riley Gardner, he killed my partner, he couldn’t kill me,
Riley Rambler, he killed Jack Ambler, he didn’t kill me,
This old hammer rings like silver, shines like gold,
Take this hammer, throw it in the river,
It rings right on, baby, it shines right on.
Some of these days I’ll see that woman, well, that’s no dream.

The instrumental version of the song I know best is Martin Simpson’s, which is available on iTunes. Or you can listen to this version, different than Simpson’s, on YouTube.

“Contrary to what I’d been told in the entertainment industry, people everywhere have a common shy hunger for literature.”
Charles Laughton (quoted in Time, Mar. 31, 1952)

I left Mrs. T behind in Tampa last Thursday (she’ll be keeping warm in Florida and Los Angeles for another couple of weeks) and flew north to New York. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to her, or to give up being a visiting scholar-in-residence at Rollins College and return to the land of dirty snow, and it didn’t help that I had to jump on the merry-go-round right away. On Saturday I drove up to Massachusetts to review Shakespeare & Company’s production of Dangerous Liaisons, then returned home the next morning and gave myself a night off–the night of Valentine’s Day, alas–before plunging back into my everyday life. No doubt I’ll be up to speed by week’s end, but for the moment I’m finding it hard to shift gears.
It’s not that I’ve been goofing off. In addition to lecturing, teaching, giving interviews, hitting deadlines, and seeing shows all over the state, I wrote the first draft of a one-man play about Louis Armstrong in my spare time. Yet all these things somehow seemed less stressful in Florida, partly because of the (mostly) pleasant weather and partly because of the change of scene, of which I was in desperate need. I was too busy with Pops and The Letter to take any noticeable amount of time off in 2009, and spending six weeks working in Winter Park was as close as I managed to get to putting my feet up.
I know I can’t go on like this, nor do I want to. After spending several hours last week working on my summer theater calendar, I managed to hack out enough time for a no-fooling pull-the-plug two-week vacation at the end of May. No shows, no deadlines, and maybe even no e-mail! Mrs. T insisted on it, and she didn’t have to do much pushing. I can’t wait to go up the spout three months from now. All I have to do is keep moving until then, and I think I’m equal to the task. Unlikely as it sounds, it’s going to help that so many shows are opening in New York during the second half of the theater season. I won’t be able to squeeze in any more out-of-town playgoing trips from now to the end of April, so instead of bouncing from coast to coast and back again, I’ll content myself with bouncing between New York and Connecticut.
For the moment, though, I’ve got three shows to see, three weeks’ worth of mail to open, and two Wall Street Journal columns to write, so excuse me if I disappear. I’ll be back next week. Until then, take it away, OGIC and CAAF! Your trusty co-blogger is about to be otherwise occupied.