Archives for November 2011

“A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.”
André Malraux, Voices of Silence

I’m worn out from last week’s travels, and so have withdrawn from the world for a couple of days of total seclusion. I’m reading P.G. Wodehouse novels, listening to music, seeing no shows, and doing no work of any kind.
I am, however, checking my e-mail from time to time, which is why I know that my downstairs neighbors were kind enough to send me a link to a recent episode of Radio Deluxe, the John Pizzarelli-Jessica Molaskey radio show. If you listen to the second track, a performance of “Let’s Fall in Love” by Louis Armstrong and the Oscar Peterson, you’ll hear John and Jess serve up a big fat plug for Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which is still selling two years after the fact. How cool is that?
I’m also pleased to report that Pops is going be published in Russia, though the publisher has yet to get in touch with me about it. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Russian edition of Pops may not redound to my benefit! Be that as it may, I’m pleased to know that my magnum opus will be translated into yet another language, and that an excerpt will soon appear in Jazz.Ru, Russia’s only jazz magazine (read all about it here).
And now…back to inactivity.

“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
André Malraux, Antimémoires

Mary Martin sings Irving Berlin’s “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun.” This clip comes from the 1957 TV version of Annie Get Your Gun:

“Sandra pulled far to the right to let him by, then looked in the rearview mirror and said, ‘The funny thing is, most fools get away with being fools.’
“‘Until they count on it,’ Parker said.”
Richard Stark, Dirty Money

The latest episode of Freakonomics Radio, hosted by Stephen Dubner, is called “Boo…Who?” It’s a wide-ranging discussion of the phenomenon of booing, and seeing as how I held forth on the subject in a 2009 Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I was asked to participate.
If you’re curious, go here to download the podcast version.

The New Dublin Voices sing Thomas Tomkins’ “When David heard”:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on three shows, the Broadway revival of Godspell, the Public Theater production of King Lear, and the Broadway transfer of David Ives’ Venus in Fur. My thoughts about the first of these shows are–shall we say–countercultural. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Skeptics be damned: “Godspell” is a joyously noisy romp that goes off like an extra-long string of firecrackers. It took 34 years for Stephen Schwartz’s once-ubiquitous rock musical, in which the gospel according to St. Matthew is enacted as a circus-like vaudeville turn, to make it back to Broadway, and by all rights the results should have been dated beyond hope of resuscitation. But Daniel Goldstein, the director of this revival, has blown all the dust off “Godspell,” and the result is not a stale exercise in boomer nostalgia à la “Hair” but a fizzy, family-friendly show that deserves to run…well, forever….
In a way, the most surprising thing about “Godspell” is that Mr. Schwartz’s score still sounds so fresh, partly because of Michael Holland’s up-to-the-second arrangements (and the high-energy playing of the seven-piece pit band) but mostly because it was so well written in the first place. You’ll remember “Day by Day” if you were around in the ’70s, but the other songs are, if anything, even catchier. That said, I doubt this revival would be half so effective had Messrs. Schwartz and Goldstein not spruced up the show, inserting pop-culture references that move John-Michael Tebelak’s original book into the age of iPads, hip-hop and Occupy Wall Street with little sense of strain. It helps, too, that everyone in the cast is funny, especially George Salazar, and that nearly everyone sings well…
Sam Waterston, the erstwhile star of “Law & Order,” is–or can be–an accomplished stage actor. He was impressive as the star of Long Wharf Theatre’s 2005 revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” less so as Polonius in the Public Theater’s 2008 Shakespeare in the Park “Hamlet.” That he should now be taking on one of the theater’s most demanding parts, the title role of “King Lear,” is an entirely different sort of challenge, and Mr. Waterston’s fussy, doddering performance, in which he clearly means to give us a Lear on the verge of senility, is dramatically monochromatic and vocally inadequate. Indeed, he sounded so hoarse on Sunday as to suggest that he was on the verge of succumbing to laryngitis. Could it be that a decade and a half of small-screen acting has dulled Mr. Waterston’s ability to fill a theater with the sound of his voice? Whatever the reason, his Lear is a well-meant failure….
If it’s possible to become a full-fledged stage star in an Off-Broadway show, then Nina Arianda did it in the 2010 premiere of David Ives’ “Venus in Fur,” a dazzlingly serious two-person comedy about a ditzy actress who auditions for a new play about a masochistic relationship and ends up seducing the self-important author-director (Hugh Dancy). “Venus in Fur” has now transferred to Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, where the gleefully sexy Ms. Arianda comes across every bit as powerfully as she did in the Classic Stage Company’s smallish performance space….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.