Archives for 2013

A rare 1956 color film clip of Tanaquil LeClercq and Jacques d’Amboise dancing with New York City Ballet in an excerpt from George Balanchine’s Western Symphony:

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

“Who knows what true loneliness is–not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.”
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

From 2004:

Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English novelist, told a friend late in life that she could no longer read Jane Austen with pleasure, not because her admiration for Austen had lessened but because she’d read her novels so many times that she had them virtually by heart, and hence could no longer be surprised by them. When I read that, I wondered: is it really possible to exhaust a masterpiece? Much less an entire art form?…

Read the whole thing here.

For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done.
Shakespeare, Richard II

I flew from Orlando (where it’s warm) to New York (where it isn’t) last night. This morning I’ll be giving a speech at TEDxBroadway 2013 which I hope will be of interest to all those present. It’s called “The One Good Reason to Take a Chance on Broadway.”
As soon as I finish talking, I’ll run to the nearest corner, jump in a cab, head for LaGuardia Airport, fly back to Orlando, collect a rental car and Mrs. T–presumably in that order–and head for West Palm Beach, where I’ll be seeing a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, writing two Wall Street Journal columns, correcting the proofs of the Commentary essay about John Gielgud that I finished writing yesterday morning, and finishing Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.
Or so, at any rate, I hope.
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“Something for Nothing,” a 1940 short in which Rube Goldberg explains the principle of perpetual motion:

Charles Boyer appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? in 1957:

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

“The great composers belong among the undisputed geniuses. More questionable is their perpetuity. It depends in the first place on the ever renewed efforts of posterity, to wit performances, which must compete with performance of all subsequent and (each time) contemporary works, while other arts can display their products once and forever; and depends in the second place on the survival of our tone system and rhythm, which is not everlasting. Mozart and Beethoven may become for a future mankind as incomprehensible as might now be to us the Greek music so highly praised by its contemporaries. They will remain great on credit, on the enthusiastic say-so of our times, like, say, the painters of antiquity, whose works have been lost.”
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on Music (courtesy of John Simon)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two Latino-themed productions, GableStage’s abridged version of Hamlet and the New York premiere of Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Water by the Spoonful. Here’s an excerpt.
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How do you make Shakespeare’s plays more easily accessible to potentially interested people who feel intimidated by their high seriousness and high-flown rhetoric? Turning them into big-budget movies with big-name casts doesn’t hurt, but it’s been a decade and a half since Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” rang the box-office gong, and it’s far from clear that such films actually persuade many of those who view them to try seeing a Shakespeare play onstage. My guess is that the only way to make the sale is to lure the customer into a theater for a live performance. So what’s the best way to bring that about?
GableStage, a lively and accomplished company located in Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami, is putting on a “Hamlet” specifically designed to do the job. Originally created by Tarell Alvin McCraney for London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, it’s a multi-racial modern-dress version that runs for 90 intermission-free minutes, nearly three hours shorter than an uncut production. The unhappy Dane is played by a Latino actor, Edgar Miguel Sanchez, who carries a knife in a shoulder holster and is in love with a jumper-clad Ophelia (Mimi Davila). Fear not, though: Mr. McCraney isn’t trying to turn the most admired of all classical verse dramas into “2B or Nt 2B.” Except for a sprinkling of Spanish-language lines, this “Hamlet” is devoid of high-concept gimmickry. What’s more, it’s acted on an Elizabethan-style stage by a cast of eight performers–and it moves fast.
It stands to reason, of course, that a 90-minute “Hamlet” can’t be poetic other than in passing. The members of Mr. McCraney’s cast reportedly refer to his production as “Hamlet, the Action Movie,” and that’s pretty much what it is, except that the dialogue is a lot better and nothing blows up. The staging is satisfyingly spare and direct. The occasional touches of slapstick don’t work very well, but otherwise it’s played straight down the center, ending with a sensational fight scene….
The first ten minutes of “Water by the Spoonful,” Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Pulitzer-winning play about recovering drug addicts who hunger for a sense of community, contains phrases like “dial the digits” and “tappin’ some extra on the side” and references to Whole Foods, quinoa, recycling, and texting, at the end of which we find ourselves in a chat room for crackheads. Rarely will you see a serious play–and this one is deadly serious–that tries so hard to sound up to the minute. Once you get used to the constant rattle of contemporaneity, though, you’ll likely find much of “Water by the Spoonful” to be genuinely involving. Be forewarned, though, that it’s a little bit sentimental and more than a little bit earnest, at times to the point of outright humorlessness….
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Read the whole thing here.