Archives for November 2010

“All actual life is encounter.”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

“Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.”
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Van Cliburn plays Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody in Moscow in 1962:

Charles Murray’s recent Washington Post essay about the emergence of a “new elite” in American life got talked about, and rightly so. But it was this part of the piece that caught my eye:

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them—which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live….
With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering. Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows—”Mad Men” now, “The Sopranos” a few years ago. But they haven’t any idea who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” They know who Oprah is, but they’ve never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.
Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.
They can talk about books endlessly, but they’ve never read a “Left Behind” novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans).
They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapagos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo.
There are so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.
Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways….

Up to a point, I think Murray is onto something—but only up to a point. Take, for instance, the case of yours truly. Yes, I’m an aesthete with an art collection who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, earns his living as a drama critic, used to play jazz, has written two opera libretti, and loves to stay in B&Bs. But that’s not all I am, or all I’ve done:
• I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a small town, and I’ve never lived in a suburb, affluent or otherwise.
• I got my bachelor’s degree from a Southern Baptist college.
• I watched the first three seasons of The Sopranos, but have yet to see a single episode of Mad Men.
• I had to look up Jimmie Johnson and the MMA, but I do know that Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, and I’ve seen plenty of episodes of The Oprah Show from beginning to end.
• I’ve never read a “Left Behind” book, but I saw (and wrote about) Left Behind: The Movie.
• Not only did I spend countless nights in my father’s various RVs, but I went to Branson for my first honeymoon, and I used to play in a country band.
• I won a Rotary Club speaking contest in high school.
• Most of the members of my family, both immediate and extended, are evangelical Christians.
So who am I, Charles Murray? Where do I fit into your system of cultural pigeonholes? How do you explain me—and might my very existence suggest that America is a more complicated place than you care to admit?

“People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.”
Edmund Burke, letter to Charles James Fox (October 8, 1777)

Today my entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the premiere of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which stars Sherie Rene Scott, Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, and Brian Stokes Mitchell and which opened cold on Broadway last night without an out-of-town tryout. Too bad–it’s no good. Here’s an excerpt.
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Recipe for a commodity musical: (1) Take an ultra-familiar piece of source material, preferably a hit movie. (2) Adapt it for the stage in the most literal and obvious way imaginable, adding only extra jokes. (3) Stir in a dozen or so innocuous songs that won’t divert the audience’s attention from how closely the stage version resembles its source. If you’re lucky, you get “The Addams Family”; if not, “9 to 5.” Either way, you get the kind of been-there-seen-that musical that has been blighting Broadway for the past decade and more.
So what does this formula have to do with “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Lincoln Center Theater’s big-budget musical version of Pedro Almodovár’s 1988 screen comedy about three women whom love has driven to the brink of madness? The answer is that Jeffrey Lane and David Yazbek, last seen on the Great White Way as the creators of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” have now sought to commoditize not an off-the-rack Hollywood comedy but one of the most individual and significant Spanish-language films of the postwar era. It’s as if they’d tried to turn “Shoot the Piano Player” or “Wings of Desire” into a Big Mac musical–and the results, not at all surprisingly, are a flavorless mess….
For all its seeming lunacy, “Women on the Verge” is in fact a wholly serious comedy about a macho culture that encourages men to be faithless to the women who love them. The fact that Mr. Almodovár is gay made it easier for him to portray that culture with a sharp-eyed detachment that did nothing to diminish his sympathy for his female characters. That’s part of what makes “Women on the Verge” more than a dizzy sex comedy: You always know whose side it’s on.
To turn so fully realized a work of cinematic art into an equally successful musical demands that it be subjected to a complete and thoroughgoing imaginative transformation. Otherwise, the new version will seem superfluous–which is what’s wrong with the stage version of “Women on the Verge.” Instead of breaking new creative ground, Mr. Lane’s book tracks Mr. Almodovár’s setting and plot slavishly, salting his script with unfunny one- and two-liners that serve only to dilute the crisp, elliptical dialogue of the screenplay. As for Mr. Yazbek’s songs, they’re as forgettable as Muzak in a noisy restaurant…
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Read the whole thing here.

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I was wrong when I said the other day that Saturday’s workshop performance of Danse Russe, the new opera that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Philadelphia’s Center City Opera Theater, is an invitation-only affair. In fact, it’s open to the public, so if you happen to be in Philadelphia at three p.m. and want to see what we’re up to, you are hereby officially invited!
Admission is free, but you’ll need a ticket to get in. For more information, go here.