Archives for March 2013

From 2003:

Sometimes it’s all too clear that a collector’s interests are fiduciary–that he wants to maintain the value of an object for which he may have paid dearly. More often, though, I think their intentions are reasonably pure. If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation–I feel it myself–but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you’re pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose….

Read the whole thing here.

“Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Liberace plays Chopin’s A-Flat Polonaise on The Liberace Show in the mid-Fifties:

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

“The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.”
Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand

In today’s Wall Street Journal column I review the Broadway transfer of Hands on a Hardbody, an important off-Broadway revival of Anita Loos’ Happy Birthday, and the premiere of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The first two are first-rate, the third a belly-up disaster. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway has been sorely in need of a new musical that touches the heart without insulting the intelligence. Now it’s got one. “Hands on a Hardbody,” in which 10 cash-strapped Texans take part in an endurance contest whose winner will drive home a brand-new pickup truck, is a deeply felt, emotionally true portrait of recession-era American life. The show’s unlikely-sounding premise–each of the contestants must keep one hand on the truck until they either give up or collapse–ends up being the occasion for an evening that is by turns festive and thought-provokingly dark. Think “Once,” only with a much better score.
A fictionalized stage version of S.R. Bindler’s 1997 film documentary of the same name, “Hands on a Hardbody” never makes the mistake of sneering at its characters and their unpretentious hopes and dreams. Instead, Doug Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”) has written a book in which they are portrayed with the kind of clear-eyed sympathy you’d expect to find in a play by Horton Foote. The tuneful Americana-style songs, by Amanda Green (“Bring It On,” “High Fidelity”) and Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitarist, are no less impressive in their understanding of the ups and downs of small-town life…
TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, which mounted flawless Off-Broadway revivals of Brian Friel’s “Lovers” and Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” last year, has done it again with “Happy Birthday,” a smart little comedy by Anita Loos, the once-celebrated author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” “Happy Birthday,” in which a prim spinster (Mary Bacon) takes refuge from a storm in the Jersey Mecca Cocktail Bar, downs a few drinks and suddenly metamorphoses into a party girl, was a huge hit on Broadway in 1946–it ran for 563 performances–but has since been forgotten, mainly because it calls for a budget-busting cast of 17. (Two of the roles have been doubled, but you won’t notice.) Scott Alan Evans has staged this revival with exceptional skill, getting all of the laughs without obscuring the melancholy that is never far from the shiny surface of Ms. Loos’ script….
Nothing about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the new theatrical version of Truman Capote’s 1958 novella about Holly Golightly (Emilia Clarke), a fey little semi-whore with a weakness for gangsters, is any good at all. Richard Greenberg’s clumsy script seeks without success to lift the book’s coolly wrought first-person narration off the page and move it to the stage. Ms. Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) gives a performance that is as flat and textureless as a piece of painted cardboard…
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Read the whole thing here.
Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green talk about the original La Jolla production of Hands on a Hardbody:

Truman Capote reads from Breakfast at Tiffany’s at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 1963:

“Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.”
George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day

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, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, extended through Apr. 28, 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 Apr. 28, reviewed here)

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

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, closes May 5, reviewed here)

• Passion (musical, PG-13, extended through Apr. 19, reviewed here)

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, extended through Apr. 27, reviewed here)

• Talley’s Folly (drama, PG-13, closes May 12, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

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

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Belleville (drama, R, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LOS ANGELES:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Old Boy (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

My first drama column appeared in The Wall Street Journal ten years ago this morning. (I wrote last May about how this unlikely occurrence came to pass.) Since then I’ve seen and reviewed a thousand-odd plays and musicals, an experience that has proved to be wholly gratifying, if not always fun.

I doubt there’ve been many midlife transformations as thoroughgoing as the one that has taken place since the Journal invited me to become its drama critic. Theater, which in 2003 was but one of my many artistic interests, has now moved decisively to center stage–so much so that I’ve actually started writing plays and opera libretti of my own, a development that would have been unimaginable, to me or anyone else, a decade ago. In the fullest sense of the phase, I am now a man of the theater. Aside from meeting Mrs. T and not dying, nothing so consequential has happened to me since I moved to New York in 1985.

I recently looked back over my drama columns of the past decade and drew up a list of the fifteen shows that have meant the most to me personally. Needless to say, it does no more than hint at the wealth of memorable productions and performances that I’ve seen, and I expect that it would look different were I to draw it up from scratch next week. Some of my favorite playwrights (like David Ives, Tom Stoppard, and August Wilson) and stage actors (like Linda Emond, Zoe Kazan, and Elizabeth Marvel) are missing. So are several of the theater companies about which I’ve written with consistent enthusiasm over the years, most particularly Chicago’s Court Theatre and TimeLine Theatre, New York’s Classic Stage Company and Irish Repertory Theatre, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. So, too, are a number of emerging talents, among them Nina Arianda, Carrie Coon, Amanda Dehnert, Amy Herzog, Jenn Thompson, and Kate Whoriskey, whom I expect will figure prominently should I have occasion to draw up a similar list in 2023.

To pick fifteen shows out of a thousand is necessarily to leave much gold on the counting-room floor. All that said, the following list will give you some sense of what I’ve liked best during my decade at the Journal.

Perhaps not surprisingly, only one of these shows, The Light in the Piazza, originated on Broadway, and it was developed in Seattle and Chicago before moving to New York, just as Doubt and I Am My Own Wife transferred to Broadway after successful off-Broadway runs. I saw seven of the shows on the list in cities other than New York. (One of them, A Minister’s Wife, later moved to Lincoln Center Theater’s off-Broadway house.) David Cromer’s revival of Our Town, the best show that I’ve seen in the past decade, originated in Chicago, then transferred to an off-Broadway theater, which was where I saw and reviewed it.

What Broadway can do is marshal resources not available to smaller companies in smaller cities. I doubt that Mike Nichols’ superb revival of Death of a Salesman, which made use of Jo Mielziner’s original 1949 set design, could have been mounted anywhere in America but Broadway. I’ve seen a not-inconsiderable number of first-rate shows there since 2003. But Broadway is no longer a hospitable place for new plays, save when fueled by the presence of a screen star, and most of the truly memorable shows that I review now take place either off Broadway or out of town.

All this is specifically relevant to my institutional mission as a drama critic. If my work for the Journal has any larger significance, it lies in the attention that I’ve sought to bring to American regional theater. About half of the shows that I cover are produced in cities other than New York, and far more often than not I’m the only reviewer with a national audience who writes about them. That is my proudest achievement as a critic.

This list is noteworthy for two other reasons: it contains only one comedy, Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, and two new musicals, The Light in the Piazza and A Minister’s Wife. Again, that is not an accurate reflection of my overall taste, especially as regards comedy. If I were to add five shows, I expect that at least three of them would be comedies (along with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which made it all the way to the final cut).

It does, however, reflect the slow but steady decline of the Broadway musical. Since 2003 I have given favorable reviews to just thirteen new musicals, only six of which opened on or transferred to Broadway. Almost all of the rest were what I call “commodity musicals,” and I’ll be greatly surprised if any of them is still being performed a decade from now.

But enough grumbling–on to the good stuff! Here’s my Top Fifteen list, with links to my original Wall Street Journal reviews:

• From 2003, the off-Broadway premiere of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, starring Jefferson Mays, directed by Moisés Kaufman, and presented by Playwrights Horizons

• From 2003, the off-Broadway premiere of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, starring Viola Davis, directed by Daniel Sullivan, and presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company

• From 2004, the off-Broadway premiere of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, starring Brían F. O’Byrne and Cherry Jones, directed by Doug Hughes, and presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club

• From 2005, the Broadway premiere of The Light in the Piazza, written by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas, starring Victoria Clark and Kelli O’Hara, directed by Bartlett Sher, and presented by Lincoln Center Theater

• From 2005, the off-Broadway premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, directed by the author and presented by 59E59 Theaters

• From 2005, the Boston production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, starring Alvin Epstein, directed by Patrick Swanson, and presented by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project

• From 2009, the Fort Myers revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, directed by Maureen Heffernan and presented by Florida Repertory Theatre

• From 2009, the off-Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by and starring David Cromer

• From 2009, the off-Broadway premiere of Horton Foote’s The Orphan’s Home Cycle, directed by Michael Wilson and presented by the Signature Theatre Company

• From 2009, the Glencoe, Illinois premiere of A Minister’s Wife, adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Candida by Austin Pendleton, Josh Schmidt, and Jan Tranen, directed by Michael Halberstam, and presented by Writers’ Theatre

• From 2009, the off-Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger, starring Matthew Broderick and J. Smith-Cameron, directed by the author, and presented by the New Group

• From 2010, the Chicago revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, starring Tracy Letts, directed by Amy Morton, and presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company

• From 2010, the Spring Green, Wisconsin revival of The Cure at Troy, adapted by Seamus Heaney from Sophocles’ Philoctetes, directed by David Frank, and presented by American Players Theatre

• From 2011, the Chicago revival of Follies, written by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman, directed by Gary Griffin, and presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater

• From 2012, the West Palm Beach, Florida revival of Paul Zindel’s The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, directed by William Hayes and presented by Palm Beach Dramaworks

* * *

Missing from this list are shows that were directed, produced, or performed by my own theatrical collaborators, past and present. Please take it for granted, though, that my admiration for Gordon Edelstein, Jonathan Kent, John Douglas Thompson, Long Wharf Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, and the Wilma Theater is limitless.