Archives for February 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important revival in Orlando, Florida, Mad Cow Theatre’s production of Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Here’s an excerpt.

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Long before Neil Simon was America’s hottest playwright, he was the youngest writer on the staff of NBC’s “Your Show of Shows.” Still fondly remembered by octogenarian connoisseurs of TV comedy, “Your Show of Shows,” which aired from 1950 to 1954, was a weekly series starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca that featured some of the best comic sketches ever to grace the small screen. The movie “My Favorite Year” was inspired by “Your Show of Shows,” and in 1993 Mr. Simon turned his own memories of working on the show into “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” a very thinly disguised roman à clef about the writers of a variety series called “The Max Prince Show.”

Mr. Simon’s career was in terminal decline by then, and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” ran for just nine months on Broadway. But TACT/The Actors Company Theatre’s 2012 Off-Broadway revival of “Lost in Yonkers” was so noteworthy that I’ve been seeking out regional productions of Mr. Simon’s other plays to see how they hold up. That’s what brought me to Orlando’s Mad Cow Theatre, which mounted an impressive “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 2010 and is now doing “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” While Mr. Simon is no Tom Stoppard, Mad Cow’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is pulverizingly funny. Not only does the play work, but this production, directed by David Russell, is a case study in how to stage punch-line humor. It doesn’t just make you laugh–it rips the laughs out of you.

“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” doesn’t have much of a plot: NBC wants Max Prince (Philip Nolen) to dumb down his program in order to satisfy the small-town rubes, and he responds by declaring war on the network. While that really did happen to “Your Show of Shows,” it feels like a contrivance, an excuse for comedy. Fortunately, the real point of “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is not Max’s relationship with the network but his relationship with his writers, who have no illusions about their half-crazy boss. As one of them explains, “Max gets in his limo every night after work, takes two tranquilizers the size of hand grenades and washes it down with a ladle full of scotch.” That’s a recipe for trouble, and for lunatic slapstick.

The excellence of this revival lies in the kill-or-be-killed ferocity with which the actors tear into the script, taking their cue from this exchange between Val (Tim Williams), the head writer, and Kenny (David Almeida), the show’s resident egghead: “A little aggression is good for writers. All humor is based on hostility, am I right, Kenny?” “Absolutely. That’s why World War II was so funny. Schmuck.” Everybody in the cast, especially Mr. Williams, throws their punches savagely hard, knowing that the Jewish humor in which Max’s writers specialize is rooted in anger–and honesty….

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Read the whole thing here.

Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca in “The Recital,” a sketch from Your Show of Shows:

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is occasioned by the coming centennial celebrations of the birth of one of my favorite composers. Here’s an excerpt.
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No one can resist a centennial. Benjamin Britten, England’s foremost classical composer, was born on Nov. 22, 1913, and the world of music has already started to mark the occasion. Go to www.britten100.org and you’ll find a list of more than 1,500 world-wide Britten-related events. That’s a lot of performances–but, then, Britten wrote a lot of music. He was the 20th century’s most successful opera composer, and most of his operas, including such masterpieces as “Peter Grimes” (1945) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1954), continue to be staged regularly. He also wrote vast amounts of vocal and instrumental music, and in addition to being a composer, he was also a supremely gifted conductor and pianist who left behind dozens of remarkable recordings…
Yet critics as a group have been slow to admit Britten to the pantheon of top-tier composers. His unfailingly accessible, straightforwardly beautiful music, like that of Aaron Copland, his opposite number in America, is widely–if by no means universally–thought to be too “easy” to be great. But there’s more to it than that. Throughout his life and to this day, Britten’s reputation has risen and fallen for reasons that have at least as much to do with his complex personality.
For openers, he was a pacifist who refused to serve in World War II, instead registering in 1942 as a conscientious objector. Not surprisingly, Britten was angrily criticized by his contemporaries for refusing to fight the Nazis….
In addition, Britten was homosexual at a time when “gross indecency” between consenting adults was a criminal offense in England (it remained so until 1967). While his sexuality was never mentioned publicly, it was known throughout the world of music and fairly well known outside it. Britten never pretended to be heterosexual–he lived with a male partner, the tenor Peter Pears–and while homosexuality was no less common then than it is today, anti-gay attitudes were far more widespread in artistic circles….
By the time of Britten’s death in 1976, the mere fact of his homosexuality was no longer controversial. But his own sexual attitudes have lately generated a different kind of controversy, for he never managed to come fully to terms with the fact that he was gay….
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Read the whole thing here.
A complete studio performance of Peter Grimes, taped by the BBC in 1969. Peter Pears performs the title role and the composer conducts the London Symphony Orchestra:

“Despair is the conclusion of fools.”
Benjamin Disraeli, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy