Archives for May 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:

• La Cage aux Folles * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• 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)

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

• That Face (drama, PG-13, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, extended through July 18, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Doctor Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine (satire, G, not easily accessible to children, closes June 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CHICAGO:

• The Good Soul of Szechuan (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favor of ‘realism.’ The search for the direct and the literal produces some of our best effects.”
Orson Welles, “Orson Welles Today,” New York Post, May 23, 1945

The Red Norvo Trio plays “Fascinating Rhythm,” with Tal Farlow on guitar and Steve Novosel on bass:

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

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

There are Booker Prize winners and there are Booker Prize winners. I still vaguely rue the day that I read online about the 2003 prize going to D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little and stopped at the bookstore on the way home from work to impulsively buy it–in hardcover, no less. A few pages were enough to relegate it to the sell pile.
What a different world is the 2009 winner, Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel’s thrilling novel of the Tudor court has been praised to the skies everywhere, so it’s not news that I’m spellbound near the halfway point. Yet the novel defies being rushed through, so I’ve been pacing myself, even starting and finishing other novels along the way (specifically, Zoë Heller’s The Believers and lately Notes on a Scandal, about which more another time). I pick up Wolf Hall when I’m feeling focused, receptive, and equal to its plenitude.
Like a Renaissance court painter, Mantel saves some of her best effects for depicting cloth–its color, texture, even the way it smells. In this middle-of-the-night scene, she describes King Henry VIII’s robe:

Henry slowly smiles. From the dream, from the night, from the night of shrouded terrors, from maggots and worms, he seems to uncurl, and stretch himself. He stands up. His face shines. The fire stripes his robe with light, and in its deep folds flicker ocher and fawn, colors of earth, of clay.

The fabric is fine, but still the stuff of Henry’s nightmares. Later in the same scene, the book’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is leaving the king. He thinks of his late friend and patron Cardinal Wolsey, exiled by Henry earlier in the novel and eventually arrested, and the fate of the cardinal’s vestments. The memory speaks to him of air, not earth like Henry’s garment.

He thinks back to the day York Place was wrecked. He and George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the cardinal’s vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they were repacked and nailed into their traveling chests, the king’s men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each folded, by an expert touch, into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the linen bands; here, let me, George Cavendish said. Freed, the cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth’s wing. When the lids of the vestments chests were raised there was the smell of cedar and spices, somber, distant, desert-dry. But the floating angels had been packed away in lavender; London rain washed against the glass, and the scent of summer flooded the dim afternoon.

When they were first seized, early in the novel, the garments didn’t seem so evanescent–they had a substance, structure, and authority that have fled in Cromwell’s memory of them.

They bring out the cardinal’s vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemize it, and having reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their traveling crates. Cavendish flinches: “For God’s sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?”

Tapestries, as distinct from paintings, receive a similar emphasis in the novel. More about that next week.

Right here:

“In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time–in the cinema there is only one.”
Orson Welles, interview, Cahiers du Cinéma in English, No. 5, 1966

It occurred to me earlier this year that I couldn’t remember the last time I took a full-fledged two-week vacation, by which I meant two weeks spent away from home during which I (A) saw no shows and (B) wrote no pieces. When I shared this piece of information with Mrs. T, she promptly informed me that I’d better change my ways if I wanted to remain happily married. I know marching orders when I hear them, so I planned and booked a spring holiday and gave my editors at The Wall Street Journal several months’ worth of fair warning. Given the fact that the past year has seen, among countless other things, the opening of The Letter and the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I figured I’d earned some time off.
It is, of course, proverbial that the surest way to hear God laugh is to make a plan. Three Sundays ago I took Mrs. T to an emergency room in Chicago at two in the morning. Two sets of doctors, the first in Chicago and the second in Connecticut, thereupon spent the following two weeks trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with her (gallstones) and what to do about it (nothing invasive, thank God). On Tuesday she was discharged from the University of Connecticut Health Center, and yesterday we hit the road.
You will note that I haven’t said where we went, where we are now, or where we’re going next. Nor will I. The plug is well and truly pulled. I wrote and filed this week’s Wall Street Journal columns in advance of our departure, but I’m taking next week off from the paper, the first time I’ve done so since I fell ill five years ago and the second time since I became the Journal‘s drama critic seven years ago. Like I said, this is a vacation, really and truly. We are, for all intents and purposes, incommunicado: I won’t be checking my e-mail or voicemail other than sporadically, and I’m not going to write anything at all.
I’ve uploaded the usual almanac entries, weekly videos, and theater-related postings for the next two weeks, so you’ll see my ghostly presence during our absence. It’s just possible–barely–that I might tweet once or twice about the joys of taking it easy. Otherwise, though, I will have nothing to say on any subject whatsoever, here or anywhere else, until June 7.
If you happen to see me between now and then, kindly keep it to yourself.