Archives for June 2011

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.

BROADWAY:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes July 17, 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)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, closes July 24, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The Front Page (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Porgy and Bess (operatic musical, PG-13, extended through July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Old Times (drama, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• Heartbreak House (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

People think of the strangest things in a crisis. When Mrs. T and I were getting ready to carry my mother to our rental car in order to rush her to the emergency room last Wednesday, I said to myself, Whenever you have to do something in a hurry, make yourself slow down. All at once I found myself recalling two of Richard Strauss’ “Golden Rules for the Album of a Young Conductor”:
• “You should not perspire when conducting. Only the audience should get warm.”
• “When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, take the tempo half as fast. (Mozart conductors, please note!)”
That’s good advice, whatever the circumstances.
* * *
Wilhelm Furtwängler leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a 1950 performance of Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks:

“The boy was young and had all his hopes, while Deets was older and had fewer. Newt sometimes asked so many questions that Deets had to laugh–he was like a cistern, from which questions flowed instead of water. Some Deets answered and some he didn’t. He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder.”
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has finally opened, and my review is in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
If beauty were really only skin deep, then “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” would be the perfect musical. Every cent of the $70 million budget is visible. George Tsypin’s sets, Kyle Cooper’s digital projections and Eiko Ishioka’s costumes have been melded into an exquisitely exact stage equivalent of the sharp-angled, high-contrast drawing style of the Marvel comic books in which Peter Parker and his web-spinning alter ego first came to fictional life. The show’s sheer visual dynamism is staggering–but except for one great performance, it has little else to offer. It’s the best-looking mediocre musical ever to open on Broadway….
Poetry, not special effects, is the engine that drives lyric theater, and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is as unpoetic as you can get. Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s book is flabby and witless. The score, by U2’s Bono and The Edge, sounds like a double album of B-sides (“Don’t think about tomorrow/We’ve only got today”). Not only are the songs forgettable, but they never succeed in generating any dramatic momentum–all they do is get louder. As for Mr. Carney and Ms. Damiano, they’re pretty, bland and devoid of charisma….
Outside of the décor, what does “Spider-Man” have going for it? The bad guy. Patrick Page is a classical actor of high distinction whom New York playgoers will remember as the mercurial Henry VIII of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s marvelous 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” Mr. Page has a voice like a cathedral organ and enough charisma to blast Mr. Carney off the stage and into the next county, and you can tell that he’s having a grand old time playing a super-villain….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

Booker T. and the MGs play “Time Is Tight”:

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

“Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.”
James Agate, Ego 4

My mother turned eighty-two today. She didn’t expect to spend her birthday in a hospital room, any more than Mrs. T and I expected to spend it sitting by her bed. As usual, I had to plug our annual summertime visit to Smalltown, U.S.A., into the only available hole in my schedule, and the hole in question closed up last Thursday. Our plan was to send flowers from the road. Instead we delivered them in person, which is–needless to say–much nicer.

Now that my mother is feeling better, I can say that her ailment (a perforated bowel) was sufficiently grave that she wasn’t expected to live. That she not only survived a major operation but now appears to be flourishing is a sign of the stamina of a woman who was born in the same year that the Great Depression began working its terrible will on America. Life was tough in the Thirties, especially if, like my mother, you grew up on a dirt farm in the middle of nowhere. Anyone who got through the Thirties in one piece isn’t likely to be fazed by a perforated bowel, or anything else.

Not surprisingly, Stephen Sondheim wrote a song about it:

I’ve run the gamut

A to Z.

Three cheers and dammit,

C’est la vie.

I got through all of last year,

And I’m here.

She sure is, for which all of the Teachouts are profoundly grateful today.

* * *

Yvonne De Carlo sings “I’m Still Here” on The David Frost Show:

“A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn’t feel like it; an amateur is one who can’t when he does feel like it.”
James Agate, Ego