Archives for 2013

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I praise two shows, Signature Theatre’s premiere production of Horton Foote’s The Old Friends and a revival in Maine, the Ogunquit Playhouse’s West Side Story. Here’s an excerpt.
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Horton Foote and Tennessee Williams were friendly competitors when they started writing plays in the early ’40s. Then Williams scored big with “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Foote dropped back into the middle distance, esteemed for his soft-spoken tales of small-town life but not widely known to the playgoing public until a few years before his death in 2009. Foote described Williams as “artistically my big brother” but “a little overwrought for my taste.” Indeed, his understated style had next to nothing in common with Williams’ flamboyant prose poetry, and I sometimes wondered how he really felt about his older colleague’s commercial success.
In “The Old Friends,” a play with which Foote tinkered at odd intervals between 1964 and 2002 but which Signature Theatre is only now giving its first fully staged production, we get what may be a clue: “The Old Friends” is a high-strung drama of rich Texans and their poor relations that begins with drunkenness and death and ends with gunfire. It’s as if the author of “The Trip to Bountiful” had said to himself, “I bet I could write that kind of play, too.” Truth to tell, he couldn’t–not quite. But “The Old Friends” though its constituent parts don’t always fit together neatly, is still a powerfully engrossing character study, one that has at least as much in common with “Uncle Vanya” as it does with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
Foote’s Chekhovian streak comes to the fore in his treatment of the central characters, Sybil (Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter), Howard (Cotter Smith) and Mamie (Lois Smith), all of whom failed to lead the lives they longed for and now find themselves deeply disappointed–but determined to do something about it while they still can. Not so Gertrude (Betty Buckley) and Julia (Veanne Cox), a pair of self-willed monsters who are no less determined to prove that even if money can’t buy you love, it can at least keep you awash in booze and boyfriends….
Jerome Robbins’ explosive choreography was integral to the impact of the original 1957 production of “West Side Story,” and few major revivals of the show have dared to do without it. Now Ogunquit Playhouse has mounted a “West Side Story” directed by BT McNicholl and freshly choreographed by Jeffry Denman, both of whose work is new to me. To be sure, theirs is a traditional production whose dances are Robbinsesque to a fault, but it’s still impeccably solid…
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I take note of the current plight of New York City Opera, which is no less dire for being painfully familiar-sounding. Here’s an excerpt.
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New York City Opera is in trouble–again. The company could fold if it fails to raise enough money–again.
Yes, you’ve heard it all before, and no, NYCO isn’t crying wolf. If the company fails to raise $7 million by the end of September, the first production of its new season will very likely be its last.
So what?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not at all indifferent to the fate of City Opera, which has been around for 70 years and throughout most of that time was central to the history of opera in America. But when an artistic organization has been in imminent peril of collapse for the better part of a decade–and when its struggles have reduced it to a shadow of its once-familiar self–such blunt questions are inescapable. In fact, they’re essential. Unless George Steel, NYCO’s general manager and artistic director since 2009, can explain why the company deserves to continue in its present form…well, it won’t….
Whenever opera buffs hear the words “New York City Opera,” they reflexively think of the good old days when NYCO was an indispensable part of the cultural life of the city after which it was named. I do, too, and probably always will. But those days ended when City Opera cut its ties with Lincoln Center. Mr. Steel did what he thought he had to do, and he may well have been right–but for better or worse, his New York City Opera is now a thing unto itself, one whose success or failure will have nothing to do with the company’s celebrated past….
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Read the whole thing here.

“It’s sometimes discouraging to see all of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he’s a hack.”
Pauline Kael, interview with Francis Davis (The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2001)

Mrs. T and I returned from Maine to Connecticut this afternoon and found a package on our front porch that contained the first finished copy of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. I took it out of the envelope and handed it to her, and she turned to the dedication page. “I had to look at my page first,” she said with a grin.
We sat on the couch and passed the book back and forth in silence for a few minutes. What I felt is not to be put in words, but I doubt that any moment in an author’s life is more purely pleasurable. No matter whether you’ve written two books or twenty, you never get blasé about holding the latest one in your hands for the first time.
Afterward I took my copy of Duke outside and snapped a photo of it. Then I went back into the house and sent this e-mail to my colleagues at Gotham Books:

I just got home and opened your package. It’s the most beautiful-looking book I’ve ever had anything to do with. Bless you all for helping to make it possible.

Whatever happens to Duke in the days and weeks to come, I’m as happy right now as it’s possible to be.
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The dedication page of Duke:

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 NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• All My Sons (drama, G, too grim for most children, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Too Many Husbands (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Weir (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.”
Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art and the Movies”