Archives for April 2012

Spring came to New York on Sunday afternoon, so I celebrated its coming by doing something that I should have done long ago. I spent a couple of hours strolling through Fort Tryon Park, the sixty-seven-acre city park whose entrance is two blocks from my front door. Connoisseurs of medieval art know Fort Tryon Park as the site of the Cloisters, but if you live, as I do, in Hudson Heights, it does double duty as your backyard. Even though Mrs. T and I moved to Hudson Heights in the fall of 2010, I’d never taken the time to explore the park on foot, and when I admitted that shameful fact to an out-of-town friend who saw a show with me on Saturday night, she looked at me as though I’d just confessed to being an axe murderer. “And it’s right there?” she asked in a voice positioned midway between horror and disdain. It was clear that the time had come to change my ways, and the sun was shining so enticingly the next morning that I figured I had no choice but to get moving.

Fort Tryon Park occupies a high hill on whose summit the Cloisters was built (or, rather, rebuilt, the museum having been moved brick by brick from France to New York between 1934 and 1938). It looks down on upper Manhattan and the Hudson River, and the views are stunning. You can reach the Cloisters by bus or take an elevator from the subway station to the top of the hill, but stalwart pedestrians prefer to walk up the winding trails that lead–eventually–from Broadway to the summit. That’s what I did: I walked from my apartment to the park, took the trail down to the street, then took a different trail back up the hill to the Cloisters.

That may sound simple enough in the telling, but I’m a middle-aged man who, if not altogether sedentary, is also not particularly athletic. I take a walk in the neighborhood most days, and when I do, I usually make a point of ascending the long staircase that leads from Washington Heights up to Hudson Heights. This, however, is not nearly so ambitious an undertaking as walking all the way down from the Cloisters to Broadway and back again, and I realized en route that it would have been a lot smarter for me to bite off a somewhat smaller piece.

By the time I figured that out, though, it was too late for me to do anything about it, so I kept on walking, and I’m glad I did. I can’t say with absolute certainty that every nook and cranny of Fort Tryon Park is as beautiful as the parts that I saw on Sunday–it’s a big place–but I never saw anything that wasn’t beautiful, and by the time I made it to the top of the hill, I was asking myself why I’d waited so long to discover what is without doubt the best part of my neighborhood.

No sooner did I reach the trailhead than I was surrounded by stroller-pushing women. Hudson Heights is a child-friendly place, and on Sunday it looked like every mother who lives there had seized the opportunity to take her children for a walk. Their presence was a perfect metaphor for the season itself. It reminded me of one of the most beautiful verses from the Song of Solomon: For, lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

As I listened to the birds singing and the children chattering, I felt the same surge of renewal in myself that I saw all around me on the street. I couldn’t help but think of the lucky streak that began when I cheated death and met Mrs. T six years ago, a few weeks before my fiftieth birthday. Ever since then, and especially in recent months, my life has been a near-unbroken string of happy surprises. In June I’ll be heading up to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire to spend five weeks working on Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington, after which I go directly to Massachusetts to rehearse my first play. Mere days ago I was inundated with still more good news.

No, I’m not as young as I used to be, but I very much doubt that I’ve ever felt much younger than I did on Sunday afternoon, trudging up a hill that should have been too high for me to climb and listening to the voice of the turtle in Fort Tryon Park.

An excerpt from a German TV documentary about the making of Martin Scorsese’s film version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Scorsese is interviewed by Joel Sucher:

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

“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.”
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review three plays that are all based on real-life characters, Side Man, 4000 Miles, and Magic/Bird. Here’s an excerpt.

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Warren Leight is best known in his latter-day capacity as showrunner for “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” but theater buffs also know him as the author of “Side Man,” a 1998 play about a young man’s attempts to come to grips with the irremediable incompatibility of his trumpet-playing father and alcoholic mother (“The rocks in her head fit the holes in his”). Though it won a best-play Tony in 1999, “Side Man” doesn’t get produced nearly as often as it should, nor is its exceptional quality sufficiently recognized. It is, in fact, one of the most beautiful “memory plays” of the 20th century, a little masterpiece fully worthy of comparison to Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” and Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” and 1st Stage, a four-year-old theater company located in a suburban strip mall not far from Washington, D.C., has given it a revival that is no less deserving of comparison to the original New York production.

For those lucky enough to have seen Edie Falco and Frank Wood in “Side Man” 14 years ago, those will be fighting words, but Lee Miseska Gardner’s perormance as “Crazy Terry” Glimmer, who has been driven to drink by the bland, oblivious indifference of her husband Gene (Chris Mancusi), a jazzman who only comes to life on the bandstand, is snarlingly true to life. Mr. Mancusi is with her every step of the way….

“4000 Miles,” in which Amy Herzog portrays the awkwardly loving relationship between a 91-year-old Communist (Mary Louise Wilson) and her neo-hippie grandson (Gabriel Ebert) who thinks that “Marx is cool,” is the best new play by a young writer to come my way since Brooke Berman’s “Hunting and Gathering.” Part of its excellence arises from the seemingly paradoxical fact that Ms. Herzog has had the good sense not to make “4000 Miles” a political drama (though she takes care not to let the unrepentant grandmother off too lightly). It is, instead, a finely wrought, closely observed character study, funny and serious in just the right proportions. Everyone in the play is believable, and everything they say to one another sounds as real as an overheard conversation.

Not only does Ms. Herzog never put a foot wrong, but Lincoln Center Theater has given “4000 Miles” a production so strong that I can’t see how it could possibly be improved….

Eric Simonson, who brought football to Broadway last season with “Lombardi,” has gone back to the well of big-league sports with “Magic/Bird,” a basketball-themed play about the friendly rivalry between Earvin “Magic” Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers (played by Kevin Daniels) and Larry Bird (Tug Coker) of the Boston Celtics. Unlike “Lombardi,” a well-crafted family drama that was strong enough to hold the interest of playgoers who knew nothing about Vince Lombardi, “Magic/Bird” is a loosely knit string of evasively one-dimensional vignettes (one might well conclude after watching the play that Mr. Johnson picked up the HIV virus from a toilet seat)….

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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I endeavor to give my colleagues–and myself–some good advice. Here’s an excerpt.
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The obituaries for Hilton Kramer, the celebrated art critic who died last month, all made prominent mention of his devastatingly terse appraisals of those artists and institutions whose work he found wanting. It was Mr. Kramer, for instance, who dismissed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibitions as “funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap.” But he was no less admired, if far less well known, for his powers as an advocate. Like all great critics, he knew how to praise, and his paeans to such underappreciated American modernists as Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery (whose later canvases he ranked “among the greatest paintings ever produced by an American artist”) did much to make their work more widely known.
Why, then, was this aspect of Mr. Kramer’s long career overlooked when he died? Because bad reviews always make a bigger splash than good ones. And why should this be so? Because critics tend as a general rule to do their most memorable writing about works of art that they dislike. In the words of Anton Ego, the haughty restaurant reviewer in Brad Bird’s film “Ratatouille,” they “thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”
So it is–but as any critic can tell you, it’s also harder to praise than to pan. The reason for this is that the language of abuse is vastly more vivid than the language of praise. Evelyn Waugh, who in addition to being a great novelist was a superb book reviewer, neatly summed up this problem in a 1937 essay: “There are infinite gradations of blame, a thousand fresh and pungent metaphors for detraction, the epithets of dissatisfaction seem never to stale…but the moment one finds a work which genuinely impresses and delights, there seems no article of expression other than the clichés that grin at one from every publisher’s advertisement.”
Above all, it’s inordinately difficult to use humor to praise a good work of art, whereas nothing is easier than to crack jokes about a bad one. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan was, like Mr. Kramer, a passionate enthusiast, yet it is his pans that people quote to this day, and the lines that get quoted are invariably the funny ones–very often, to be sure, because their wit is wrapped around a hard core of truth. When Mr. Tynan described T.S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion” as a “has-been, would-be masterpiece,” or wrote in a review of “Antony and Cleopatra” that Vivien Leigh “picks at the part [of Cleopatra] with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag,” you could hear the thunk of the arrow hitting the bull’s-eye.
What is easiest to do, alas, tends to get done rather more often than it should, and nothing is easier than to make fun of that which you don’t understand….
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Read the whole thing here.
An excerpt from Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. Anton Ego’s voice is dubbed by Peter O’Toole:

“Every foole knoweth that hatreds are the cinders of affection.”
Sir Walter Raleigh, letter to Sir Robert Cecil (May 10, 1593)

The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, will be receiving its New York premiere in February of 2013. It will be produced by Dicapo Opera Theatre, with performances scheduled for Feb. 7, 9, 15, and 17 at the company’s Upper East Side theater.
This will be the second production of The Letter, which was commissioned and premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2009. Paul and I are revising the score and libretto especially for this revival.
Casting is still in the works–watch this space for details.