Passion (PS Classics, two CDs). The original-cast album of John Doyle’s 2013 small-scale Classic Stage Company revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, featuring a piercingly poignant star turn by Judy Kuhn and rescored for a nine-piece chamber ensemble by Jonathan Tunick. Would that the production had been taped for telecast, but this complete recording is far more than a mere souvenir of an unforgettable night at the theater. To quote my Wall Street Journal review, “It will be a long time before we see another staging…that speaks so eloquently of the black mysteries of the human heart” (TT).
Archives for November 2013
CD
BOOK
Gary Burton, Learning to Listen: The Jazz Journey of Gary Burton (Berklee, $27.99 paper). A great jazzman tells his fascinating story with appealingly unselfconscious directness. It’s quite a tale: Burton, who ranks alongside Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, and Red Norvo as the most influential of all jazz vibraphonists, more or less invented fusion and is one of a handful of openly gay top-tier jazz soloists. He’s played alongside plenty of other heavy hitters, including George Shearing, Stan Getz, and Pat Metheny, and sketches their personalities as clearly and honestly as he does his own. One of the most readable jazz memoirs ever written (TT).
CD
Leon Fleisher: The Compete Album Collection (Sony Classical, 23 CDs). A compelling case can be made for calling Fleisher the greatest American classical pianist of the postwar era, and you’ll find that case made with comprehensive eloquence in this brand-new boxed set of his complete commercial recordings for Columbia and Epic. It includes concerted works by Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Franck, Grieg, Hindemith, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Schumann, plus solo pieces and chamber music by Brahms, Copland, Debussy, Liszt, Mozart, Ravel, Rorem, Schubert, and Weber, all played with Fleisher’s signature blend of virtuosity, and intelligence. The price is ridiculously right–$56.50 on Amazon (TT).
PLAY
Hamlet/Saint Joan (Lynn Redgrave Theatre, 45 Bleecker St., closes Feb. 2). Bedlam Theatre Company’s brilliantly original four-person small-scale stagings of two of the greatest of all English-language plays are now being performed in rotating repertory in an off-Broadway house. I raved about the original productions in The Wall Street Journal, as did ever other critic in town. Go, repeatedly (TT).
TT: Wrong turn at Albuquerque
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I pan two New York shows, Little Miss Sunshine and The Jacksonian, the first with regret and the second with rage. Here’s an excerpt.
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The arrival in New York of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a musical version of the 2006 hit indie flick about an unhappy family from Albuquerque that takes an 800-mile road trip to enroll its youngest member in a children’s beauty pageant, teaches a salutary lesson: No matter how good you are, you can still write a bad show. William Finn and James Lapine, the co-creators of “Little Miss Sunshine,” are gifted and experienced without limit. They last collaborated on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” one of the two best musicals of the past decade. Yet “Little Miss Sunshine” is a dud, one whose flaws appear in the cold light of hindsight to be blindingly self-evident. What were they thinking? Perhaps one day they’ll tell us, but for now all we can do is wonder….
The film moves fast. Everything is shown, scarcely anything told. In a musical, by contrast, the score exists to exteriorize and explain the emotions of the characters. Not only does this slow the action down to a crawl, but Mr. Finn’s songs are sentimental, in most cases stickily so: “I can’t be blind/That you sometimes gave and took at will/But you left behind/Some shoes that I have yet to fill.” Nothing could be further removed from the tart wit of Michael Arndt’s apple-crisp screenplay….
Beth Henley wrote one really good play, “Crimes of the Heart,” in which she apparently said everything she had to say. That didn’t stop her from writing 14 more plays. “The Jacksonian,” her latest effort, is a total disaster, a suppuratingly ripe hunk of semi-autobiographical Southern Gothic sex-racism-and-murder extravagance whose point of view is summed up by the first stage direction: “The action of the play takes place at the Jacksonian Motel, an establishment on the outskirts of Jackson, Mississippi. The motel exists as a haunting memory, a sort of purgatory that was Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1964.” Purgatory–got that? Need I add that Ms. Henley was born and raised in Jackson but now lives in California?…
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Read the whole thing here.
I also take note in today’s column of the off-Broadway remounting of Bedlam’s extraordinary four-person productions of Hamlet and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, which will run in rotating repertory at the Lynn Fontanne Theatre through Feb. 2 and which I recommend very strongly.
For more information, go here.
TT: Almanac
“When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I said to them, in my simplicity, ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.'”
G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America
TT: So you want to see a show?
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, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Feb. 1, 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)
• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, newly extended through Dec. 29, reviewed here)
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, performed in rotating repertory, closes Feb. 2, original production reviewed here)
• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, extended through Dec. 29, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, extended through Dec. 8, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Winslow Boy (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes Dec. 2, reviewed here)
TT: Almanac
“‘Well, I do believe some things, of course,’ conceded Father Brown; ‘and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.'”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Dagger With Wings”