Archives for 2013

“Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I. When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.”
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle, of which I am a member, voted on its annual awards today. Here are the winners:
• Best play: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Christopher Durang)
• Best musical: Matilda (Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly)
• Special citations: Soho Rep, New York City Center’s Encores! series, and John Lee Beatty
For more information about the awards–including the votes of the individual members of the NYDCC–go here.

I just made a quick reviewing trip to Chicago, and in today’s Wall Street Journal I report favorably on the two shows that I saw there, Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind and the original version of Pal Joey. Here’s an excerpt.
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America’s regional theaters are catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, and it’s not hard to see why. Yes, virtually all of his 77 plays are uproariously funny comedies–but most of them are also deeply melancholy, at times joltingly so. Do an Ayckbourn and you get crowd-pleasing laughs and bonus points for seriousness. It makes good sense, then, that Eclipse Theatre Company, which specializes in three-show seasons devoted to the work of a single playwright, should be giving him the deluxe treatment this year, and that the first show of the season, “Woman in Mind,” is one of the many plays by Mr. Ayckbourn in which comedy and tragedy are so tightly coiled that you can’t pull them apart.
As the lights goes up, you see a middle-aged woman (Sally Eames) being treated by a mild-mannered doctor (Larry Baldacci) who is speaking to her not in English but in gibberish (“Pie squeaking jinglish cow”), making it impossible for her to understand what he’s saying. Susan, we learn, just received an accidental blow to the head that has left her temporarily disoriented. Soon, though, she snaps back into focus, and the members of her cheerful, loving family, who appear to have stepped out of a tennis-anyone garden-party comedy, arrive on the scene and start fawning over her. If you didn’t know any better, you might well suspect that you were in for a boringly conventional evening. But Mr. Ayckbourn likes nothing better than to deal from the bottom of the deck, and little is as it seems in “Woman in Mind,” least of all Susan’s goody-goody husband, daughter and son-in-law-to-be….
What follows is a hard-edged comedy that is simultaneously funny and horrific. It is also extraordinarily well performed, especially by Ms. Eames, who plays her part not as a tour de force of comic ingenuity but as a stingingly true-to-life study of a woman who can no longer bear the pain of her disappointments….
“Pal Joey” is on of the all-time great Broadway musicals, a portrait of life on the bottom rungs of show biz in which Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart teamed up to immensely potent effect with John O’Hara (“Appointment in Samarra”), who wrote the book. Yet it’s rarely seen nowadays, and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2008 Broadway revival was a monstrosity in which Richard Greenberg rewrote O’Hara’s no-nonsense book to coy and campy effect. Now Chicago’s Porchlight Music Theatre has given the original 1940 version a lively small-scale revival which proves that the creators of “Pal Joey” knew exactly what they were doing….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”
H.L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces

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, extended through Aug. 11, reviewed here)

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

• Orphans (drama, PG-13, closing May 19, 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 May 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

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

“It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

When you write as much as I do, you sometimes forget about having written certain pieces. Even so, I was flabbergasted when it was recently drawn to my attention that I’d written a piece about Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo in 2009 for American Cowboy:

Is Rio Bravo the best movie ever made, or merely the best Western? I’m kidding, of course–but kidding on the square. While Rio Bravo may not be the best of all possible Westerns, it makes the top-five list of everybody I know who truly loves the genre. And though highbrow critics didn’t pay much attention to the film when it came out in 1959, they’ve long since changed their tune. David Thomson, the smartest film critic in America, went so far as to include Rio Bravo in his new book, “Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, a fat volume of miniature essays about the most significant movies of the twentieth century, in which he unhesitatingly calls it “great.”
If by “great” you mean King Lear, or even Citizen Kane, then I must humbly beg to differ. But I think you could make a strong case for calling Rio Bravo the most entertaining movie ever to come out of Hollywood. It is one of those supremely rare works of art that has the power to take you out of yourself and set you down again in a parallel universe of pleasure, one in which nothing matters but the experience of watching a group of gifted men and women doing something as well as it can possibly be done….

Read the whole thing here.
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The opening scene of Rio Bravo: