Archives for November 2012

I’m en route to Manhattan for the first time since just before Hurricane Sandy came calling–and snow was falling on Connecticut mere minutes after my train pulled out of Hartford. Once I reached New Haven, I learned that my connecting train was an hour late. By the time I finally get to my apartment, I’ll have about enough time to open my accumulated snail mail before turning around and heading down to Times Square to see the last press preview of Annie.
That’s the bad news. The good news was more than adequately summed up in the press release that I found in my e-mailbox a few minutes ago:

NEW HAVEN–Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf has become the biggest hit in the history of the theatre’s Stage II.
The show, written by Terry Teachout, directed by Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, and starring John Douglas Thompson, has become the highest grossing play since Stage II opened during the 1977-78 season. The play has brought in more single ticket sales than the 2008-09 season production of Hughie, starring Brian Dennehy. Ranking third on the list is Dennehy again, appearing in Krapp’s Last Tape during the 2011-12 season.
Final performances run through November 11. Tickets are still available at www.longwharf.org and by calling 203-787-4282.
“We are extremely grateful to the audience for their support of this production,” said Managing Director Josh Borenstein. “Every night, we hear words of praise from our patrons, which is an extraordinarily gratifying feeling.”
“John Douglas Thompson’s portrayal of beloved jazz great Louis Armstrong is one of the indelible performances in the 48-year history of Long Wharf Theatre. His exhilarating tour de force that navigates between the aging trumpeter and his predatory white Jewish manager Joe Glaser has been a marvel to behold. What a joy to have been associated with this project,” said Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.

As for me, I’m proud, but also humbled. I never expected Satchmo to do remotely this well, and I don’t need to be told that it wouldn’t have done so without John, Gordon, and my other colleagues at Long Wharf and Shakespeare & Company. Theater is a collaborative art. I’ve been blessed with the best collaborators imaginable. Thank you, dear friends.
Now, on to Philadelphia!

Kenneth Tynan interviews Richard Burton in 1967:

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

“I do not see why I should lock myself inside a purely personal idiom. It is largely a matter of when one was born. If I had been born in 1813 instead of 1913 I should have been a romantic, primarly concerned to express my personality in music. Whereas now I am contented to write in the manner best suited to the words, theme, or dramatic situation I happen to be handling.”
Benjamin Britten, “Freeman of Lowestoft”

From 2004:

Ever since I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I’ve been seeing two or three plays a week, which appears to satisfy most of my interior demand for plot-driven narrative. When I’m not watching a play or a film, I now find I’d just as soon go to the ballet, look at paintings, or listen to music. And what do these latter art forms have in common? They’re not narrative-driven, at least not in the way that novels and dramatic TV series require you to follow a verbally articulated story line as it unfolds through time. I get enough of that at the office….

Read the whole thing here.

“Artists are artists because they have an extra sensitivity–a skin less, perhaps, than other people; and the great ones have an uncomfortable habit of being right about many things, long before their time.”
Benjamin Britten, “Freeman of Lowestoft”

Richard Burton is interviewed about Electronovision, the process used to record his 1964 Broadway performance as Hamlet:

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

“The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works.”
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (courtesy of Edward Rothstein)

Mrs. T and I returned to our place in Connecticut yesterday, turned on the TV, and saw what was happening in New York City, my other adopted hometown. Friends of mine who live there have been plunged into a daily misery that is shockingly new to them, and for the most part they’re unable to spread the word about their situation because they have no electricity. I grieve to behold their plight.
Train service from Connecticut to New York is limited and erratic. Even if we could get to our apartment in upper Manhattan, we’d be stuck there, since our subway stop is out of service. So here we sit, watching the news and marveling anew at the harshness of life–from a distance.
It happens that I was in Smalltown, U.S.A., on 9/11, and wasn’t able to fly back to New York for five agonizing days. Much the same thing is happening to me now. The experience, as I wrote not long afterward, was deeply unsettling:

I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable–and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure….

No doubt Dr. Johnson, that most cold-eyed and hard-headed of sages, would dismiss what I wrote back then as cant. None but a fool longs to share suffering needlessly, there being more than enough of it in one man’s lifetime to go around. That said, it still feels strange–and sad–to be exiled from a suffering New York City yet again.