Archives for 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal I have nothing very good to say about two new Broadway shows, Lucky Guy and Kinky Boots. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you lived in New York in the Nineties, you might remember Mike McAlary, a tabloid columnist who mostly wrote about the police and their activities. Back then he was something of a local celebrity, but today scarcely anybody not employed by a newspaper has heard of him, even though he won a Pulitzer Prize and published four books prior to his death in 1998.
So…would you pay a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play about McAlary? Especially if it wasn’t any good?
The answer to this question is necessarily complicated by the fact that “Lucky Guy” stars Tom Hanks and was written by Nora Ephron, who died last year. But it’s still slack and amateurish, and unless you have an all-consuming interest in what the newspaper business was like at the tail end of the 20th century, it’s hard to see how “Lucky Guy” comes anywhere near passing the who-cares test.
The working title of “Lucky Guy” was “Stories About McAlary,” which goes a long way toward explaining what went wrong with the final product. McAlary was the kind of by-any-means-necessary reporter who dragged his self-made legend behind him like a U-Haul, and Ms. Ephron has glued a dozen or so juicy anecdotes together in chronological order, unfortunately neglecting to dramatize them. Her characters spend more time talking to the audience than they do to each other, and everything they say is obvious…
In “Kinky Boots,” Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper have concocted an imitation heart-warming British working-class musical with a gay angle and a maudlin finale. It is, I suppose, progress of a sort that we need no longer import such phony shows–we can now make them ourselves….
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Read the whole thing here.

“What a loathsome sub-species dramatic critics are.”
P.G. Wodehouse, letter to Denis Mackaill, July 2, 1957

Wilfrid Sheed nailed Roger Ebert, intentionally or not, in Max Jamison, in which he spoke in passing of a movie critic who was “the kind of man who said, ‘Whatever became of Anna May Wong?’ and meant every word of it. He had the true-blue, twelve-year-old Captain Ranger heart of a veteran film reviewer.”
Ebert, who died yesterday, was at bottom mainly interested in pop culture, something that I suspect is true of most people who write regularly about film, the ultimate mass medium. But he was genuinely responsive to high art as well, and if he was more a reviewer than a critic, he almost always had sensible things to say about the films that he saw. After you read his reviews, you knew pretty much what to expect if you went to see them for yourself, which is no small achievement.
He was, in short, the very best kind of middlebrow, an earnest enthusiast who took his work seriously. Though he never gave me the thrill of illumination that I get from reading Otis Ferguson or David Thomson or (sometimes) Pauline Kael, I rarely failed to profit from seeing what he had to say, and I profited in a diferent way from watching him die by inches in public, carrying himself to the very end with a courage and dignity that were admirable in every way. We should all be so brave when our time comes.
UPDATE: I ran across this quote from Ebert in one of his newspaper obituaries:

No matter what your opinion, every review should give some idea of what the reader would experience in actually seeing the film. In other words, if it is a Pauly Shore comedy, there are people who like them, and they should be able to discover in your review if the new one is down to their usual standard.

He practiced what he preached.

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, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Hands on a Hardbody (musical, G/PG-13, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 28, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Apr. 28, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, closes May 5, reviewed here)

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 27, reviewed here)

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

• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes June 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• You Can’t Take It With You (comedy, G, closes Apr. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Passion (musical, PG-13, closes Apr. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, closes Apr. 14, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Belleville (drama, R, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

• Happy Birthday (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, performed in rotating repertory, reviewed here)

“The theatre owes us, the workers, nothing. It owes its audience stories and truth, and now we give it careerism and the very visible steps of our ascent. We need to once again ask to be made worthy of our arts and not demand our place within them.”
Elia Kazan (interview with James Grissom, 1993, courtesy of Terry O’Brien)

Doug Ramsey, the noted jazz critic, blogger, and sometime novelist, announced on Monday that discounted copies of Poodie James, his first novel, are now on sale via his website. I praised the book when it came out in 2007:

Not only is it handsomely and lyrically written, but Ramsey’s snapshots of small-town life circa 1948 are altogether convincing, and he has even brought off the immensely difficult trick of worming his way into the consciousness of a deaf person without betraying the slightest sense of strain….Ramsey is no less adept at sketching the constant tension between tolerance and suspicion that is part and parcel of the communal life of every small town. I grew up in a place not unlike the Washington town where Poodie James is set, and so can testify to the knowing skill with which it is portrayed here.

For more information, go here.

A TV adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest starring Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall, originally telecast on NBC’s Producers’ Showcase in 1955. This was Bogart’s only televised dramatic performance:

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

“He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.”
P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money