Archives for July 2014

“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.”

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

Elaine Stritch, one of the twentieth century’s finest musical-comedy singers and most difficult human beings, has died at the improbable age of eighty-nine. While Stritchie (as Noël Coward dared to call her) is now best remembered for having been in the original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, in which she sang “The Ladies Who Lunch,” she had a remarkable career before and after that landmark show, though her alcoholism too often kept her from making the best possible use of her extraordinary talents.

Stritch was past her prime when I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, but I still had occasion to review her on a few noteworthy occasions, including a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in which she acquitted herself quite wonderfully well.

My fondest memory of her, though, is of Elaine Stritch at Liberty, her 2002 one-woman Broadway show, in which she was brassily frank and scabrously funny about her long, erratic career (thanks in large part to John Lahr of The New Yorker, who undertook the thankless task of collaborating with her on the script). I wrote about the show in my New York column for the Washington Post:

Elaine Stritch can’t sing, but it doesn’t matter. “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” her one-woman show currently playing at the Neil Simon Theater, is an engrossing evening of alarmingly candid reminiscence by an actress who has seen everything and lived, and when she croaks her way through Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” the only acceptable response is to cheer and cheer again. “She can’t carry a tune in a bag,” I muttered to the woman sitting next to me, who muttered back, “I wish I couldn’t carry a tune like that.” Me, too.

I also remember how fabulous she looked in black tights—the very model of a sexy older woman.

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From the 1970 documentary Company: Original Cast Album, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, Elaine Stritch sings “The Ladies Who Lunch” at the recording sessions for the show’s original-cast album:

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, many performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• When We Were Young and Unafraid (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 10, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• The Dance of Death (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes July 27, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Days Like Today (musical, PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Devil’s Disciple (serious comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:
• Last of the Red Hot Lovers (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (serious comedy, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

“My reading habits have not changed over the years, only my eyesight has changed. I don’t like being indoors and get out every chance I get. In order to read, one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.”

E.B. White, Paris Review interview, Fall 1969 (courtesy of Michael Greenspan)

Mrs. T and I drove up to Ontario yesterday to see four plays at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of the prettiest and most pleasant places I know, a preternaturally neat town where the lawns look as though they were trimmed three times a day and you can’t get a bad meal unless you go out of your way to find it.

I paid my first professional visit to Canada in 2009. Since then I’ve returned to see shows every summer, both because Canadian theater is excellent and because I find the country itself to be so agreeable—and interesting. My interest, which has ripened into outright fascination, dates from my reading of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. Part of what fascinates me is that Canada looks and sounds deceptively like its southern neighbor, but is nonetheless, as I first learned from Wilson, a very different place with a strongly distinctive and self-conscious identity of its own.

To read an article like this is to be made acutely aware of the extent to which some Canadians define that identity in terms of not being American. As Mike Myers famously said, “Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavor—we’re more like celery as a flavor.”

As I wrote during my first visit to Canada:

I’ve been walking around town each afternoon in search of impressions. Mostly I’m struck by how similar Canada is to America—and how intensely aware it is of its neighbor to the south. While I have no doubt that surface appearances are deceiving, it’s also true that every other story I read in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, is either about the United States or makes prominent reference to it….

The main thing I’ve noticed since arriving on Sunday is that everyone here seems to be nice. Granted, I’ve yet to meet a Canadian I didn’t like, but the unfailing agreeability of the people whom I’ve encountered in Stratford suggests that niceness might well be a component of the Canadian national character.

To be sure, I would never dream of generalizing with any authority about Canada based on a handful of visits. On the other hand, I have a fair number of close friends who come from there, and they all have two things in common: they are nice without exception and conspicuously ill at ease about tooting their own horns. Anyone who decides to live and work in this country is by definition self-selected for ambition, yet just about every Canadian expatriate I know is diffident to the point of shyness when it comes to acting decisively on that ambition.

I discovered Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, my favorite Canadian novel, in 2008, and found it unusually revealing on this score. In it MacLennan refers to Canada as a “cautious country which had always done more than she had promised, had always endured in silence while others reaped the glory.” That sentence describes most of my Canadian friends to the letter.

As far as the deceptive similarities go, they’re sometimes so conspicuous as to be downright amusing. At breakfast this morning I heard two young women conversing merrily in the nasal yap-speak that is characteristic of American women of their age: “Yah. Yah. That’s AHH-some. Yah.” Were it not for their unmistakable Canadian accents, I would have taken them to be from Los Angeles.

But Niagara-on-the-Lake is not—to put it mildly—Los Angeles, and though the Shaw Festival is one of the finest theatrical enterprises of its kind in North America, it’s not nearly so well known in the United States as it ought to be, perhaps because it’s…well, Canadian. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy coming here so much, just as I love my Canadian friends in part because they are so very Canadian, and so very unlike me.

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UPDATE: To read Mordecai Richler’s 1965 review of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada, go here.

Glenn Gould’s Toronto, originally telecast by the CBC in 1979:

Julius Katchen plays two of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances on French TV. Katchen, a renowned specialist in the music of Brahms, died of cancer in 1969 at the age of 42:

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

“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”

A.J. Liebling, The Honest Rainmaker (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)