Archives for 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:

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 9, 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)

IN CHICAGO:

• Freud’s Last Session (drama, PG-13, restaging of off-Broadway production, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

IN MINNEAPOLIS:

• The Sunshine Boys (comedy, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:

• A Little Night Music (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 12, reviewed here)

“He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”
James Joyce, “A Painful Case”

Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins dance an excerpt from George Balanchine’s Apollo, set to the music of Igor Stravinsky:

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

“Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In three hours I’ll be sitting in a rehearsal studio in Lenox, Massachusetts, watching John Douglas Thompson give the first reading of the latest revision of Satchmo at the Waldorf, the one that I wrote last month at the MacDowell Colony. I’ve never seen this version of the play or heard it read out loud. John, Gordon Edelstein, and I feel pretty good about it, but hard experience has taught me that you never know whether a show works, or how well it works, until you see it done. All I know is that we have three weeks to get it right.
Send some friendly thoughts my way this afternoon–and tonight.

From 2004:

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn’t meet until after I’d figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull….

Read the whole thing here.

“Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

Today I drive to Lenox, Massachusetts, where I’ll be spending the next few weeks. Rehearsals for Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, begin tomorrow at noon, and the show opens at Shakespeare & Company on August 22.
I expect to post with fair frequency between now and then, but don’t be surprised if I drop out of sight on occasion. John Douglas Thompson, Gordon Edelstein, and I are going to be incredibly busy, which suits me just fine. I’ve been waiting for weeks to roll up my sleeves and get cracking. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
Theater people don’t wish one another luck–they say “Break a leg” or Merde! I invite you to supply a euphemism of your own choosing. Whatever it is, wish me plenty of it.