Archives for April 2013

I wrote about him last year in Commentary. This is part of what I said there:

Country music, needless to say, has changed greatly in the quarter-century since Jones last topped the charts. The “hard” style of his generation of country singers and their legendary predecessors long ago gave way to a slicker, youth-oriented sound. The music of such contemporary country acts as The Band Perry and Lady Antebellum is often all but impossible to distinguish from the pop-rock from which it derives, save for the distinctive red-state accents in which it is sung.
But while today’s country stars prefer to steer clear of Jones’s piercing pathos, what they do remains recognizably related to what he did (and continues to do). Like him, they are professional purveyors of a commercial music that is created collaboratively–and their music, like his, continues to appeal to the working- and middle-class listeners whose everyday lives are portrayed in its lyrics. That is part of what makes country music commercial: it tells ordinary Americans the truth about their lives. What makes the best of it art is that it does so with simplicity, economy, and beauty, and no country singer has ever been more truthful–or more artful–than George Jones….

He’ll be remembered.
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George Jones sings “The Grand Tour”:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I wrap up my coverage of the current Broadway season with unenthusiastic reviews of Pippin and I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers. Here’s an excerpt.
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Diane Paulus first made a name for herself on Broadway by exhuming “Hair.” Now she’s back again with another hippy-dippy period piece, Stephen Schwartz’s “Pippin,” whose rock-and-water score was all the rage back in 1972. The original production, directed by Bob Fosse, ran for 1,944 performances, longer than “The Music Man,” “The Sound of Music” or “South Pacific.” Since then “Pippin” has faded from view, but Ms. Paulus’s production, which originated earlier this season at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, is a knock-’em-dead extravaganza meant to “revive” the show in every sense of the word….
In 1972 Pippin’s tale was told by a ragtag band of commedia dell’arte players, whereas Ms. Paulus’ version is set in a circus tent and performed by a mixture of Broadway gypsies and circus acrobats. At the same time, she’s preserved some of the tone of Mr. Fosse’s universally admired production by having the show choreographed by Chet Walker “in the style of Bob Fosse” (that’s how his credit reads)….
Patina Miller, lately of “Sister Act,” is the Leading Player, a role created four decades ago by Ben Vereen, and her in-your-face performance sets the tone for Ms. Paulus’ relentlessly aggressive staging, which is big, noisy and mostly humorless, a “Pippin” that looks as if it had been born not in Cambridge but Las Vegas….
Bette Midler, like many pop singers, is a good screen actor. She’s never acted in a stage play, though, and somebody should have told her that she’d have been better off making her belated debut in something less demanding than a one-person Broadway show–especially since the show is no good. John Logan’s “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers,” in which Ms. Midler impersonates the late Hollywood superagent, isn’t the worst one-person play to hit Broadway this century (that would be “Ann”). It is, however, more than bad enough, and Ms. Midler’s performance, while not incompetent, is lackluster.
The hardest part of writing a solo show is infusing it with dramatic conflict. Mr. Logan (“Red”) hasn’t even tried to do that. All he does is plop Ms. Mengers down on a couch, on which she remains ensconced until the last half-minute of “I’ll Eat You Last,” and have her tell the story of her life, which consists in the main of a string of foul-mouthed anecdotes about her celebrated ex-clients , among them Gene Hackman, Ali MacGraw and Barbra Streisand. (Ms. Mengers, it seems, never took on a client who didn’t end up firing her.) Outside of a couple of incoming phone calls and an audience-participation bit, nothing else happens….
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Read the whole thing here.
A scene from I’ll Eat You Last:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I report on a conversation I recently had with a stage director who blew the whistle on why regional-theater programming is growing less interesting. Here’s an excerpt.
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Not long ago I spoke to the artistic director of a well-regarded theater company somewhere in America that’s feeling the pinch. No names: I’ll call her Ms. X for the sake of convenience, though “she” may or may not be a woman. In addition to running the company, Ms. X is a stage director of high seriousness, one whose work I’ve praised in the past. Yet her company is inching away from the kind of programming that led me to start reviewing its shows in the first place. I didn’t ask why–we were talking about something else–but Ms. X volunteered an explanation, and though I wasn’t taking notes, this is more or less what she said to me:
“I’m in the ticket-selling business. If I don’t sell tickets, we shut down. We used to do it by selling subscriptions. That gave us money up front, and it also made it easier for me to do serious work, because people were buying a five-show package, and they trusted me to give them a well-chosen, wide-ranging package each year. We’d do a comedy, a new play or two, a classical revival, maybe a couple of modern classics. August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, that kind of thing. Sometimes they didn’t like all five. Maybe they never did. But they still went home feeling like they’d gotten a balanced diet, they’d done their duty to theater. And that used to matter to people. It really did. They thought that seeing good shows made you a better person.
“Then the subscription model fell apart, for a lot of reasons. Some subscribers got too busy, or too old, to commit in advance to five shows on specific dates. Some of them couldn’t afford to buy all five in one pop anymore. And young people never have gotten in the habit of subscribing to anything. On demand, that’s their motto. Anyway, it all added up to the same thing: We had to start selling individual shows instead of a package. When that happened, everything changed. Instead of trusting us to give them something good, people started playing it safe, and we had to play safe with them. We didn’t have any choice….”
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Read the whole thing here.

“Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.”
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

If you’re in or near the Kansas City area on Friday afternoon, I’ll be giving a lecture at William Jewell College, my alma mater, at one p.m. The title is “From Critic to Creator: How a Drama Critic Changed Hats.” I’ll be speaking in Gano Memorial Chapel, on whose stage I gave my last public performances as an actor nearly four decades ago.
William Jewell College is located in Liberty, Missouri, just north of Kansas City. For more information about the lecture, which is open to the public, go here.

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)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, reviewed here)

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

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes July 7, 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)

• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes June 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

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

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

“The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.”
Mary McCarthy, “Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue” (1950)

I’m currently fussing over the interior design of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. This morning I sent an e-mail to Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books in which I explained where to place the illustrations, which will be interspersed throughout the text. Instead of using page numbers, which will not be set in stone until the entire book is set up in type, I identified the relevant paragraphs by quoting their opening words.

The resulting list amounts to a “found poem” about Ellington. I thought it might amuse you to see it.

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Ellington’s surface qualities were exploited

None of it showed

J.E. was born in North Carolina

Another way in which Ellington enriched

Many of his superstitions centered on death

After wrapping up a two-week run

What they cannot show us is how the band

When it came to sex, though

“Raymond? He has perfect taste”

The band itself continued to perform

Unlike Strayhorn’s break with Ellington

A Drum Is a Woman was to be a poetic allegory

Sargeant, a longtime admirer

President Nixon addressed the crowd

So he stayed on the road

From then on he made no secret