Archives for October 18, 2012

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:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, 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)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Marry Me a Little (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Misalliance (serious comedy, G/PG-13, far too talky for children, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

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

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Lovers (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times gives a big thumbs-up to Satchmo at the Waldorf:

Reviewing a play is one thing; writing a play is quite another. Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, makes this hat-switching look far easier than it is with his first play, the one-man show “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” receiving a skillful production at the Long Wharf Theater here.
Mr. Teachout has done a fine job of building a fiction-plus-fact theater piece from his biography “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” and John Douglas Thompson brings the script to life with a smart, sure performance. Mr. Thompson conjures not only Armstrong but also Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, who was white….
Mr. Teachout weaves his considerable knowledge about Armstrong’s life and place in the jazz pantheon around the relationship between Armstrong and Glaser, a blunt man who arranged just about every aspect of Armstrong’s career but had ties to the mob. Glaser had died a few years before the action here takes place, and Mr. Thompson’s Armstrong minces no words in conveying that he is still bitter about being slighted in Glaser’s will. The details of why he is so angry form the climax of “Satchmo,” and a failure-to-communicate twist ends the story on a bittersweet note.
None of this would work without a top-notch performance, and Mr. Thompson delivers one, switching convincingly between Armstrong and Glaser with a shift of voice and posture and a little help from Stephen Strawbridge’s lighting.
Mr. Thompson and his director, Gordon Edelstein, make the wise decision not to try for an Armstrong impersonation; a good actor doesn’t need cheap mimicry….

Read the whole thing here.

If you’re in or near Greenwich, Connecticut, the Greenwich Library is presenting “Remembering Louis Armstrong,” a symposium occasioned by the New Haven premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf. I’ll be taking part in the discussion, along with George Avakian, who produced Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy; Dan Morgenstern, who knew Armstrong well and wrote about him perceptively in Living With Jazz; and Ricky Riccardi, the Armstrong blogger and author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years. Between the four of us, I expect we’ll have something interesting to say.
The proceedings start at seven p.m. tonight at the main library, located at 101 West Putnam Avenue. For more information, go here.

“Christ, one has to beware of critics–good or bad, one might be constrained to believe them.”
Richard Burton, diary entry, Jan. 4, 1969