Archives for August 29, 2013

I rejoice to report that an excerpt from Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, will appear in the Fall 2013 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It’s a special American-music issue guest-edited by Gerald Early, and it’ll be the first time that any part of Satchmo has appeared in print, as well as my first appearance in the pages of Daedalus.
The excerpt is prefaced by an author’s note called “Satchmo’s Shadow”:

Writing the biography of a performing artist is like standing in the wings to watch a play. You see what the public sees, only from a different perspective. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, my 2009 biography of the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century, is about the much-loved genius-entertainer who made millions of people feel warm inside–but it’s also about the private Armstrong, who swore like a trooper and knew how to hold a grudge. The fact that Satchmo (as he liked to call himself) had two sides to his personality doesn’t mean that the public man was somehow less “real” than the private one. Like all geniuses, Armstrong was complicated, and that complexity was part of what made his music so beautiful and profound.
Biography is about telling, theater about showing. Having written a book that told the story of Armstrong’s life, it occurred to me that it might be a worthwhile challenge to try to show an audience what he was like offstage. This was the seed from which Satchmo at the Waldorf grew….

Just in case you were wondering, all of the countless four-, seven-, and twelve-letter words in Satchmo will be printed IN THEIR ENTIRETY.
For more information about the issue, 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)

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

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Oct. 9, 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)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Faith Healer (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)

• Major Barbara (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 19, reviewed here)

• Our Betters (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, closes Nov. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Weir (drama, PG-13, extended through Sept. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• King Lear (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:

• Absurd Person Singular (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I always tell my students that if the reader knows something about your psychology that you do not admit, you’re in trouble. The reader will notice that you’re an asshole because instead of going to your mother’s deathbed you’re out buying really nice designer boots. If you don’t acknowledge the assholery of that choice, then there’s a rift, a disjunction between narrator and reader. And in autobiography, that intimacy is part of what readers want. They have to trust your judgment.”
Mary Karr, interview, The Paris Review (Winter 2009)