Archives for 2013

From 2003:

If absolutely necessary, I can manage 2,500 polished words between sunrise and bedtime. In the immortal words of James Burnham, “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.” But I try not to write that much in a single day. It’s not exactly compatible with having a life….

Read the whole thing here.

“Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

I was surprised–very surprised, if truth be told–when I learned last week that Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington had made the “longlist” (i.e., the list of ten semi-finalists) for the National Book Awards 2013 nonfiction prize. It’s not that I doubt the merits of Duke. The problem is that it’s about art.

As I pointed out at the time, Duke was the only art-related title among the ten books on the NBA’s nonfiction longlist. Nor is that unusual. In the past twenty years, just nine NBA nonfiction finalists have been about art in whole or part, and only two, Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve (which is not primarily about aesthetic matters) and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, went on to win the award. No art-related books were tapped as finalists in 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2008, or 2011. Moreover, Just Kids and Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, a wide-ranging intellectual history of western culture and its discontents, were the only titles among those nine books that dealt with non-literary art forms. Of the others, two were about Shakespeare, one was a collection of essays by Gore Vidal, one was about a philosophical poem by Lucretius, and the others were biographies of Colette, Ralph Ellison, and Rousseau. All worthy, of course, but it’s as if architecture, classical music and jazz, dance, film and TV, painting, sculpture, and theater after 1616 simply didn’t exist.

I’m not suggesting that the National Book Awards are biased against the arts. I served on the NBA’s panel of nonfiction judges in 2003, after all, and voted enthusiastically with my colleagues to honor a masterly memoir that had nothing whatsoever to do with artistic pursuits. Besides, you’ll find broadly similar results if you take a look at the lists of Pulitzer Prizes in biography and general non-fiction.

What’s in evidence here, I think, is something bigger, something that goes to the heart of our national character. In America you can be thought perfectly well educated without knowing much of anything about the arts. I’m acquainted with any number of board-certified intellectuals whom I doubt would recognize the names of (say) Samuel Barber, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Loesser, Lynn Nottage, Walker Percy, Preston Sturges, Paul Taylor, or Lester Young. Nor would they blush to have that fact pointed out to them. For such folk, the life of the mind is a calling that need not encompass the arts. They read histories, biographies, and books about current events, not novels, and they’re rarely if ever to be found in concert halls, theaters, or museums. It’s my guess that the National Book Awards, like the Pulitzer Prizes, have a natural tendency to reflect that collective preference.

Why should this be the case? Because ours is a youngish country with shallow cultural roots, one in which art has traditionally occupied a place well off to the side of the mainstream of American life. Even when we pay attention to the arts, our perspective on them is like as not to be utilitarian, not aesthetic.

I wrote about the latter phenomenon seven years ago in a Wall Street Journal column about the so-called “Mozart Effect,” and what I said then remains true today:

Ours is a can-do, no-frills culture, shaped by the frontier experience and the Protestant work ethic, and even in this Age of Leisure, the notion that a fellow might want to look at a Cézanne watercolor or a Balanchine ballet simply because it makes him feel good is alien to many, perhaps most Americans, whatever their political views. It’s not enough that art should make us happy: We also want it to improve us, to make us smarter and richer, and maybe even thinner.

It wouldn’t be quite right to say that none of this bothers me, but it’s something that I accept, since I’ve lived with it since I was a boy. I realized early on that my own all-consuming interest in the arts, both fine and popular, was destined to set me apart from most of the people I knew. They simply weren’t interested in the things that interested me, so I learned to talk to them about different things. Moreover, I’ve never had trouble finding other people who share my own interests, and in time I figured out how to make a decent living writing about them. Yet I knew that my audience would be comparatively small, and to this day I can’t shake off a lingering feeling of embarrassment at being (as I once put it) “a lifetime member of the awkward squad….Even now there’s a part of me that wishes I knew all about baseball instead of ballet.”

For this reason, I rejoice even more than I might otherwise have done at my National Book Award nomination. I don’t expect Duke to advance to the finals, much less to win the prize. I don’t know that I’d vote for Duke if I were a judge–the competition is awfully stiff this year. Still, I made the first cut, and I did so by writing the biography of a great American artist. Like the song says, I did it my way. Of that I am, and will always be, fiercely proud.

Walker Percy talks about alienation in a 1986 interview:

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

“Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”
William Faulkner, “The Bear”

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two New York productions, the new Broadway staging of Romeo and Juliet and an off-off-Broadway version of Don Juan in Hell. One is much better than the other. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Shakespeare on Broadway is always a risky proposition, both financially and artistically. Even “Romeo and Juliet,” which is as safe as it gets, hasn’t been seen there for a quarter-century. Nor is David Leveaux a particularly safe proposition: Of the 11 shows he’s previously directed on Broadway, only one, the 2004 revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” was a hit. So it makes sense that he should have taken out an expensive piece of flop insurance for his new production of “R & J.” Orlando Bloom, the Romeo, is a movie star best known to American audiences for his appearances in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, and Mr. Leveaux has given him a cheer-for-the-star entrance: He rides a motorcycle onstage and pulls off his helmet, resulting in squeals from all the susceptible girls in the audience.
Would that Mr. Bloom’s big entrance led to something interesting, but this “R & J” is a slick, weightless assemblage of modern-dress trickery (Romeo wears a hoodie and jeans) whose conception is as stale as its been-there-seen-that décor and TV-movie music….
To put the emphasis on youth is a perfectly honorable way to stage “Romeo and Juliet.” I’ve seen many regional productions of the play that went out of their way to do so, often to exciting effect. Part of the problem here is that Mr. Bloom is a decade older than Condola Rashad, his 26-year-old Juliet, and looks every day of it. Most of the rest of the problem arises from the regrettable fact that neither Mr. Bloom nor Ms. Rashad has ever acted in a Shakespeare play. Broadway is not the place to make your debut as a classical actor, and Mr. Bloom turns in an energetic but emotionally unvaried performance in which he gives the impression of squeezing expression out of a tube instead of finding it in his lines….
In 1949 Charles Laughton made a tidy bundle by presenting “Don Juan in Hell,” the 90-minute-long central sequence of George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” as a dramatic reading performed on a bare stage by four big-name actors in evening dress (Mr. Laughton’s colleagues on that celebrated occasion were Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead). Since then it’s become fairly common to see “Don Juan in Hell” performed in this frugal manner, but I’ve never seen it done separate from “Man and Superman” in a fully staged production. Hence the inherent interest of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble’s modern-dress version, directed by Karen Case Cook, in which Shaw’s wordy but magnetically involving discussion of the meaning of life unfolds in a tiny theater on an abstract set designed by Tsubasa and Jennifer Stimple Kamei that looks like a piece of Asian installation art.
Accompanied by the eerie, perfectly timed electronic music of Ellen Mandel, Ms. Cook’s “Don Juan in Hell” comes across as a full-blooded drama, not a debate. The staging, in which Shaw’s characters are aware of and play directly to the audience, adds focus and emphasis to the proceedings…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The opening scene of Charles Laughton’s production of Don Juan in Hell, recorded by Columbia in 1952:

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.”
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

• 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)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 20, reviewed here)

• Dickens in America (one-man play, G, too demanding for small children, closes Oct. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

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

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Old Friends (drama, PG-13, extended through Oct. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN OGUNQUIT, MAINE:

• West Side Story (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• All My Sons (drama, G, too grim for most children, reviewed here)