Archives for January 2014

From 2004:

I’m in the process of writing a brief life of Balanchine for Harcourt, so I expect to be going to NYCB two or three times a week throughout the next couple of months. I just returned from my first performance of the winter season, an all-Balanchine triple bill of Prodigal Son, Serenade, and Scotch Symphony, two masterpieces and a lesser but nonetheless delightful effort. I brought with me a jazz musician who’d never seen any of Balanchine’s choreography, and was eager to find out what she’d been missing.
Most serious balletgoers (if not all) have felt for some time now that NYCB was in decline, and tonight’s performance did little to prove them wrong….
On the other hand, it’s also worth reporting that my guest was stunned–the only possible word–by her first encounter with Balanchine’s choreography. I gave her a discreet glance at the end of Serenade and saw that she was crying softly. That’s just as it should be: Balanchine’s greatest ballets are sturdy enough to make their effect even in unfocused, infirm performances. I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling her that last night’s Serenade, for all its virtues, was far removed from the way that immortal masterpiece looks when lovingly set by a first-string repetiteur on a meticulously rehearsed company. For her, the only thing that matters is that she’s just discovered a new world of beauty whose existence she never even suspected. I envy her….

Read the whole thing here.

“If only I could come up with a gripping opening line I would feel easier. All that has floated my way so far is–‘Shakespeare, in Henry V, has a brief phrase, “Old men forget.'” It is horribly true, as every old person knows, but what would be even more disturbing would be ‘Old men remember!’, for once they start remembering how the hell do you put a stop to them? And by ‘them’ I mean me.”
Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor

I read the other day that two old friends of mine got a divorce. I call them “friends” because there was a time when I knew them both quite well, but they moved away from New York a quarter-century ago, and I’ve seen next to nothing of them since then. In fact, I can’t remember the last time that I saw either one in the flesh. So while it briefly made me sad to learn of their decision to part, I realized almost in the next instant that my sorrow was entirely retrospective, and thus meaningless.
I’ve no idea why they broke up, by the way, though he’s a successful man of a certain age, which makes it not altogether unlikely that I could guess some of his reasons without undue difficulty. Hers are another story. But the truth is that I don’t know either of my old friends anymore, which means that they’re no longer my friends. They might as well be strangers. They exist only in memory.
I recently gave an interview in which I was asked to talk about (among other things) Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. In it I made the following observation:

Another part of what’s fascinating about A Dance to the Music of Time is that it resembles life in that people who you like, die. Or are transformed in such a way that you don’t like them anymore. This is something that Patrick O’Brian, a novelist whom I like very much, does not do. It makes him a lesser artist. Until the very end of the series, O’Brian will not kill off characters whom we like. He wants to keep their world intact, and so it becomes harder and harder for his two principal characters, Aubrey and Maturin, to have interesting new experiences. The problem is that we’re so invested in them that we want things to turn out well for them in every book. With Powell, on the other hand, the characters get under our skins because they sometimes go off to war and never come back.

That’s what my friends did, more or less. They went away and never came back, and I missed them for a time. The wife rather more than the husband: I liked her enormously, though it was evident to me that she could easily be what used to be called “a pistol.” That said, I liked him, too, and thought them both thoroughly decent people, and in the ensuing years I’ve wondered on occasion how they were doing. Now, up to a point, I know.
Part of the melancholy of modern American life is rooted in the fact that you can’t help but lose touch with friends. Unless you live, as I once did, in a small town, you have to work very hard to maintain friendships with people whom you don’t see regularly in the normal course of things–at the office, say. Getting married inevitably causes certain friends to drop off the scope. So do having children and getting divorced. To move to another city is almost by definition to trade in your old friends for new ones. I hate to say it, but I can come close to counting on the fingers of one hand the people to whom I’m as close today as I was in 1989, or 1999. The friction of life can turn the best of intentions to dust.
I know, of course, that what makes me feel so wistful is part of the dynamism that is inextricably bound up with the American national character. Those who wish to change their lives can always “light out for the Territory,” as Huck Finn puts it, and see what there is to see further down the road. That’s what I did, in stages: I made my way from Smalltown, U.S.A., to upper Manhattan, and it’s perfectly possible that I haven’t made my last move yet.
Nor do I regret, save in occasional spasms of self-doubt, my youthful decision to hit the road. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure that it suited, or suits, my inborn temperament, which I suspect was–and is–otherwise inclined. Yet I know that I, too, partake of the American itch to wander. The great unrealized fantasy of my life, one that goes all the way back to my high-school days, has been to buy a motor home, pull up stakes, and light out for nowhere in particular. My father, whom I suspect of having had the same fantasy, got as far as buying the motor home, though he never drove it much more than a hundred miles from our front door. I never saw him sadder than on the day he finally sold it, a year or two before his death.
I’m lucky in that I remain close to my family–I know people who haven’t spoken to their siblings for years–and that I’ve had the same best friend, Our Girl in Chicago, for nearly two decades. It’s even more remarkable that she’s lived halfway across the country from me for the whole of that time. And I’m luckier still to have made a happy marriage in the middle of life. Alas, I’m also old enough that the ranks of my other friends are starting to be thinned out by death, the most permanent of partings.
So now I make a concerted effort to seek out new friends, most of whom are younger than me, and I try as best I can to maintain such long-lived friendships as I still have. Like most members in good standing of the verbal class, I use Facebook and Twitter to the latter end, even though I’m well aware that they supply nothing more than a simulacrum of true friendship. But long experience has taught me that most friendships, no matter how true and enduring they may seem at first blush, will prove in the end to have been strictly temporary. And once in a while I hear a piece of news about a person whom I used to know once upon a time, and my heart lifts or sinks for a moment, depending on whether the news is good or bad–and assuming that I can still tell the difference.
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Bob Dylan sings “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”:

Marlon Brando in an excerpt from Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film version of Julius Caesar:

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

“What a relief it is to listen to American accents dealing with Shakespeare. They sound much more authentic than our own overrefined or suburban efforts.”
Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on Chicago Shakespeare’s new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here’s an excerpt.
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What is so lovely and life-giving about Barbara Gaines’ Chicago Shakespeare production of “Merry Wives,” in which the play is reset in England shortly after World War II, is that the good humor seems to roll off the stage in great, generous waves of joy. The lights come up on the main street of Windsor, snow starts to fall and the stage fills with genial souls (and an equally genial dog, one of three in the cast). The war being over, everybody strikes up a chorus of “Ac-Cent-Tchu-ate the Positive,” and you can all but hear the audience going “Ooooh!” Nor is there anything manipulative about the creation of that collective pleasure, which lasts the whole night long. That “ooooh” is the sound of a fallen world being made whole.
“The Merry Wives of Windsor” cries out for music, so much so that it’s been turned into three different operas, and Ms. Gaines and Doug Peck, her musical director, oblige by filling the evening with period pop songs that are sung by the members of the cast–sometimes well, sometimes less so, but always to precise emotional effect. How ingenious and telling it is for Mistresses Ford and Page (Heidi Kettenring and Kelli Fox) to plot their tormentor’s comeuppance while singing “The Gentleman Is a Dope” in the kitchen, or for Sir John (Scott Jaeck) to be serenaded with a rousing chorus of “Too Fat Polka”! The object, as Ms. Gaines explains in her program note, is to portray “a society that is trying to separate itself from the horrors of war and rebuild itself. Hope and optimism are in the air–and the music of the period reflects that.” That it does, irresistibly.
Mr. Jaeck gives us a blimp-like Falstaff whose own fantasies of irresistibility are magnificently ludicrous. I wish he were less prone to encrust his lines with chortles and chuckles–he’d be funnier if he pruned away at least two-thirds of them–and I also wish that the big-city accent of Matt Mueller, who plays Fenton as a visiting American soldier, were more specific. Beyond that, I haven’t a single complaint, and for Ms. Kettenring and Ms. Fox I have nothing but praise. They are correctly portrayed as wised-up, hip-flask-toting women of a certain age in whom the gleeful spark of carnal mischief is far from dead, and you’ll share the relish with which they turn the tables on Sir John….
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Merry Wives:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I sound off testily on boomer nostalgia. Here’s an excerpt.
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When the surviving members of the cast of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” which originally ran on the BBC between 1969 and 1974, announced plans to give their first public performances as a group since 1982, tickets for the opening-night show sold out in 43.5 seconds. It’s not known whether the comedians will be doing any new material, but I doubt it. That’s not why people come to this kind of event, after all. They come for much the same reason that they came to Broadway in 2005 to see Eric Idle’s musical stage version of “Spamalot”: to applaud their lost youth. Hence they don’t want to see anything new, though they’ll put up with it if absolutely necessary.
Most “Monty Python” fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. Witness their tiresomely obsessive fascination with the popular television series of their youth. Likewise their undimmed passion for the rock music of the ’60s and ’70s, which they still love so much that they’ll buy expensive tickets to see wrinkled old codgers play it onstage.
As always with the boomers, this nostalgia contains more than a touch of narcissism. The same narcissism was on display in many of the countless gushy boomer-penned reminiscences occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. An indisputably major historical event, to be sure, but there was also something decidedly creepy about the self-centered tone of those suddenly-my-world-changed pieces, which was deftly skewered by this Onion headline: “Area Man Can Remember Exactly Where He Was, What He Was Doing When He Assassinated John F. Kennedy.” Like everything else in the boomers’ world, Kennedy’s death turned out in the end to have been all about them.
I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the ’60s and ’70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the ’20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Both of them felt nostalgic about certain aspects of the culture of the ’30s and ’40s, but they never wallowed in it. Theirs was, you might say, a matter-of-fact nostalgia: They’d had too tough a time to feel any other way about their youth….
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Read the whole thing here.