Archives for June 2014

When I went to see Satchmo at the Waldorf on Friday, a middle-aged woman sitting in the center of the second row pulled out her cellphone midway through the performance and spent five minutes checking her e-mail. The upstairs auditorium of the Westside Theatre is steeply raked, meaning that the phone was clearly visible to most of the audience—and the light that it emitted made the woman in question just as visible to John Douglas Thompson, who was standing in front of her.

“I thought of chewing her out in character,” John told me after the show. “It didn’t matter which character I was playing—I could have cussed her out as Satchmo, Joe Glaser, or Miles Davis. The only thing that stopped me was that I was afraid I’d go up in my lines. Otherwise I would have given her hell.”

“If I’d been sitting behind her, I would have given her hell,” I replied. As for Mrs. T, she was too busy spluttering with rage to put in her two cents’ worth.

I’ve seen a fair amount of uncivil behavior in theaters over the years, so it takes a lot to make me boggle—but that did it. To check your e-mail in the middle of a performance is rude no matter where you’re sitting. To do it when you’re fifteen feet away from the stage upon which a one-man play is being performed is unforgivable.

The most effective turn-off-your-cellphones announcement I’ve ever heard preceded a performance by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. It went like this: Turn off your ******* phones. (I’ll let you fill in the blank.)

Short of that extremity, I doubt that any pre-show announcement, no matter how clever, will persuade the boors among us to clean up their act. The time, then, has come for an unrelentingly aggressive campaign of public shaming. From now on, I swear to chew out on the spot any playgoer whom I catch using a cellphone in the middle of a performance. So should you. So should we all—and so should every stage actor in America.

The next time it happens to John, I want him to stop the show cold, point at the offender, and say, “I can see that you’re using a cellphone. That’s inconsiderate and disrespectful, not just to me but to everyone who bought a ticket to the show. So please turn it off—right now—or one of the ushers will escort you out of the theater.”

That’ll shut ’em down.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the finale of Haydn’s Eighty-Eighth Symphony—without using his hands:

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

“From Walter there came an aura, a warm triumphant glow that made Jeffrey wonder whether all triumphs were not the same and whether the solace which anyone derived from them might not be based upon some half-forgotten slight.”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two New York shows, Holler if Ya Hear Me and Much Ado About Nothing. Here’s an excerpt.

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Thirty-five years after the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” the first full-fledged rap record, Broadway finally has its very own hip-hop jukebox musical. “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” whose score consists of 21 songs by Tupac Shakur, is (says the publicist) “a non-biographical story about friendship, family, revenge, change and hope.” The presumptive reason why it’s “non-biographical” is because the producers don’t own the rights to Mr. Shakur’s life story. Whether they sought to acquire those rights isn’t known, but “Holler if Ya Hear Me” would likely have been more interesting if they had.

In addition to being a popular rapper, Mr. Shakur was—to put it mildly—a piece of work. Born in 1971 to a pair of Black Panthers, he made his stage debut at 12 in a Harlem production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” cut his first solo album in 1991 (Dan Quayle denounced it), made his first movie in 1992, did time for “first-degree sexual assault” in 1995 and was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. His murderers were never found.

That’s a story I’d pay to see. Not so Todd Kreidler’s book for “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” a thrice-told tale of ghetto life that’s full of carbon-copied dialogue (“I always wanted you to be good—good in ways I wasn’t”) and ends with a violent denouement close enough to “West Side Story” to be actionable. This may explain why Kenny Leon’s staging of the show’s dialogue scenes is so slackly paced: He had nothing to work with.

The songs are another matter altogether, though it should be said up front that Daryl Waters, who is credited with “music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements,” has in fact transformed many of Mr. Shakur’s spoken monologues into something more like traditional theatrical songs, adding melodically fleshed-out choral parts and laying the lyrics on top of sophisticated, jazz-flavored accompaniments played by a first-class pit band. The idea, I assume, was to make the score more immediately accessible to Broadway audiences. It works, too: “Holler” is one of the best-sounding new musicals to come to Broadway in quite some time. That said, the hardest-hitting songs, like the title tune, are usually the ones that most closely resemble Mr. Shakur’s plainer recorded performances….

Jack O’Brien, lately of “The Nance,” has made his Shakespeare in the Park debut with an undemanding, thoroughly amiable staging of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater play Beatrice and Benedick, both of whom affect to hold marriage in contempt but succumb (after much friendly skullduggery) to its charms. Appropriately enough, Mr. O’Brien has given us an al fresco reworking of Shakespeare’s play in which the action is updated to Sicily circa 1900. It’s an eminently logical transposition, and John Lee Beatty, the set designer, has made it even more plausible by erecting on the stage of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater a sun-kissed villa whose accoutrements include a working fountain, a climbable orange tree and a vegetable patch…

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To read my review of Holler if Ya Hear Me, go here.

To read my review of Much Ado About Nothing, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I outline my plan for a compulsory year-long nationwide high-school course called “The American Experience in Art.” In lieu of an excerpt from the column, here are the works on my proposed syllabus:

• Two full-length novels, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

• One short novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

• Two plays, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

• A selection of poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes

• One group of paintings, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, studied in conjunction with a selection of recordings by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington

• One dance, Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (music by Aaron Copland)

• One musical, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (choreography by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)

• Three films, John Ford’s The Searchers, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (music by Bernard Herrmann) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives

Read the whole thing here.

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A 1959 performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company of Appalachian Spring:

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

My old friend Anne Kornblut took this snapshot of Mrs. T and me toward the end of last night’s Bradley Prize ceremony. I think it conveys pretty clearly how we were feeling:

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:
• Bullets Over Broadway (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, virtually performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes July 27, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

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

IN CHICAGO:
• Juno (musical, PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• The Dance of Death (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)
• Days Like Today (musical, PG-13, extended through July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Ayckbourn Ensemble (three serious comedies playing in rotating repertory, PG-13, closes June 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Casa Valentina (drama, PG-13, closes June 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Damn Yankees (musical, G, reviewed here)