Archives for February 2013

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:

• Annie (musical, G, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, extended through Apr. 14, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Mar. 31, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN LOS ANGELES:

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, closes Apr. 14, original production reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• You Can’t Take It With You (comedy, G, closes Apr. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• The Other Place (drama, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• A Raisin in the Sun (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Peter was like that: he had the capacity for cruelty that comes so easily to the self-righteous.”
Len Deighton, Winter: A Novel of a Berlin Family

Fewer and fewer people can say that they heard Van Cliburn play a solo recital. I did, in Kansas City in 1978, not long before he retired from the concert stage, and it was one of the most impressive musical experiences of my life.

Not that he did anything unusual: the program consisted of familiar pieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy that he’d recorded for RCA and played regularly from adolescence onward, and he interpreted them in a very “centric” way, devoid of mannerisms of any kind. Yet there was nothing impersonal about the way he played them. His tone was huge and rich, his rubato restrained and sensitive, his technique faultless. He was, I realized at once, a true artist.

It wasn’t enough, of course. He’d become unimaginably famous at the age of twenty-three after winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. Moreover, fame had complicated his life to a degree scarcely more imaginable, for Cliburn, who died today at the age of seventy-eight, was a deeply closeted Eisenhower-era homosexual who lived in Texas and went to church every Sunday. To be a celebrity under such circumstances was an invitation to unhappiness. It didn’t help that he had an inexplicable incuriosity about music. The pieces that he learned as a student were for the most part the pieces he played in concert for the rest of his career. He was great, but he stopped growing, and before long he stopped performing as well.

Now that he’s gone, it seems safe to say that a frank biography will soon be published, one that seeks to disentangle the sad complexities of his private life. I’ll read it, but I’ll be more inclined to revisit his records, a fair number of which are as good as any that have ever been made by a classical pianist. (I especially like this one.) In the long run, that’s what will matter most about Van Cliburn. The rest, as they say, is history.

* * *

Tim Page’s Washington Post obituary is here.

Anthony Tommasini’s New York Times obituary is here.

Van Cliburn plays Liszt’s Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody, one of the few works in his concert repertoire that he never recorded commercially:

John Barrymore speaks Hamlet’s soliloquy in Playmates (1941), co-starring Kay Kyser. This was Barrymore’s final film appearance. He died of alcoholism in 1942:

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

“Only the truly great actor can be ridiculous on one night, and sublime on another.”
Ronald Harwood, Sir Donald Wolfit: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre

From 2004, a memory of watching Lost in Translation with my septuagenarian mother:

Somewhat to my surprise, she liked it, though she initially found Sofia Coppola’s elliptical style of storytelling a bit hard to follow. (Gen-X moviegoers suckled on MTV take jump cuts for granted, but most people born before 1950 or so are accustomed to films in which the plot elements are laid out fairly straightforwardly.) In addition, it hit me after about 10 minutes that she didn’t know what jet lag was…

Read the whole thing here.

“If you try to write ‘good lines’ you’ll likely wind up with strings of dumb, unconnected applause lines. The audience will probably applaud–crowds of supporters are dutiful that way, and people want to be polite–but they’ll know they’re applauding an applause line, not a thought, and they’ll know they’re enacting enthusiasm, not feeling it. This accounts for some of the tinniness of much modern political experience.”
Peggy Noonan, A Sunday Thought (“Peggy Noonan’s Blog,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 2013)