Archives for August 2014

I’ve never been a celebrity hound, or even much of a celebrity spotter. I actually got through an entire performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company without realizing that Joel Grey was sitting next to me. But I did see Lauren Bacall twice and spoke to her once, and both of those brief encounters are clearly etched in my memory.

The first one took place in January of 1976, when I went with a group of college students from Missouri to see American Ballet Theatre at Broadway’s Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin Theatre). It was my first trip to New York, as well as the first time I’d ever been to any kind of dance performance. Mikhail Baryshnikov, newly defected from Russia, was dancing in Fokine’s Spectre of the Rose, and Bacall was sitting directly in front of me. I blush to admit that I spent more time looking at her than at him. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, I took both of their presences for granted, assuming that everyday life in New York was just like that, an uninterrupted succession of miracles. When, a quarter-century later, I covered the opening of Wicked for The Wall Street Journal, I was quietly amused by the fact that it was being performed in the same theater.

The second time I saw Bacall was a decade ago. I went to a cabaret performance by Amanda Green, whom I met in the lobby after the show. Bacall had also been in the audience, and Green introduced me to her. I somehow managed to stammer out something marginally appropriate, to which Bacall responded graciously in her famously low and throaty voice, and that was that. I remember thinking, My God, she looks just like herself! And so, of course, she did, very obviously older but still as beautiful and poised as ever.

By then I’d watched Baryshnikov dance countless times and even interviewed him, and I’ve seen him a few more times since then—but whenever I do, I always think of the long-ago night when I saw him step through a window on the stage of the Uris, simultaneously gaping at Lauren Bacall out of the corner of one of my star-struck eyes.

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Mikhail Baryshnikov and Marianna Tcherkassky dance Michel Fokine’s La Spectre de la Rose at Wolf Trap in 1976. The score is Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance. This was Baryshnikov’s American TV debut:

From Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of Hamlet, the “To be or not to be” sequence. The musical score is by William Walton:

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

“They used to say tragedy purified, helped you to let go. Now it only embarrasses. They’ve made a law against it.”

Edward Bond, The Sea

From 2004, a posting by Our Girl in Chicago:

I’m a child of the 80s, and it’s the popular music from this decade that stirs up the strongest raw feeling in me. The music I love from these years, and the music I hate, rings up equally high readings on the nostalgia meter. All of it, the good and the bad, sounds affectingly like my life once upon a time. Somebody, I can’t remember who, said “memory is the key to everything, but with it comes nostalgia, which is the key to nothing,” a dictum I sort of loathe but grudgingly credit—although, then again, I don’t think my own attachment to nostalgia is an illusion that it will unlock or illuminate anything. To flip-flop yet some more, maybe nostalgia is the key to lists like this. In other words, it’s the key to something–just not something meaningful….

Read the whole thing here.

“But I think he [H.G. Wells] thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

A friend writes:

I watched your last two embedded video clips together—Jonathan Winters and Louis Armstrong—and I was struck with the occasional unhappiness in both men’s faces. You could assemble a collage of momentary Armstrong stills that would look like rage, torture, you name it. Winters turned his unhappiness into comedy and blankness (the blankness was funny, of course, but I think it was also truly blank). Your man turned it into joy—much harder, much more worthy.

My friend is a veteran biographer, so I expect him to be shrewd about the niceties of personality, but even for him this was an acute observation. Winters, of course, was a man who could be fairly described as emotionally troubled, enough so that his once-great career more or less disintegrated, though he kept on working to the end of his life. And while Armstrong was a fundamentally sunny and optimistic person, his moodiness was sufficiently well known to his friends and colleagues that Time mentioned it in its 1949 cover story: “He has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage.”

In Winters’ case, his private sorrows were arguably characteristic of those drawn to his profession. It’s no secret that much comedy—maybe most of it—is driven by anger and aggression. When I reviewed Mad Cow Theatre’s 2013 revival of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, I was struck by the honesty with which Simon acknowledged that fact in what amounted to a roman à clef about the writers with whom he had worked in the Fifties on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows:

The excellence of this revival lies in the kill-or-be-killed ferocity with which the actors tear into the script, taking their cue from this exchange between Val (Tim Williams), the head writer, and Kenny (David Almeida), the show’s resident egghead: “A little aggression is good for writers. All humor is based on hostility, am I right, Kenny?” “Absolutely. That’s why World War II was so funny. Schmuck.” Everybody in the cast, especially Mr. Williams, throws their punches savagely hard, knowing that the Jewish humor in which Max’s writers specialize is rooted in anger–and honesty.

Jazz is (often) a different story, and Louis Armstrong a very different sort of artist. When I portrayed him on stage in Satchmo at the Waldorf, I made a point of showing his capacity for rage, since it’s an aspect of his personality of which most of his fans were and are unaware. But I also allowed my fictionalized Armstrong to describe what I believe to be the truth about his character, in words that are largely his own:

I don’t think folks wanna hear all that angry shit when they lay down that good money to come hear me play. They ain’t paying for me to make ’em feel bad. I’m just an old ham actor—blow a tune, tell a joke. I’m there in the cause of happiness. Like when I play the blues, maybe I’m thinking about one of them low-down moments, like when your woman don’t treat you right. Hell of a thing when a woman tell you, “I got me another mule in my stall.” But when I sing about it, I smile. Make you smile….To me, jazz got to be a happy music. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep—and that’s what makes it good.

Yes, there are other ways to turn life into art, and there were those who thought that his sunny-sided aesthetic was naïve. But Armstrong was no naïf: he was a man without illusions who had seen the worst that life has to offer. His commitment to hope was serious, just as all first-rate comedy is serious, and as I’ve said many times in this space and elsewhere, I believe deeply that comedy, with its honest acknowledgment of the unintended absurdities of human existence, is at bottom truer to life than tragedy. That’s what makes it good—and that’s what made Louis Armstrong great.

UPDATE: I wrote this posting before learning of Robin Williams’ suicide—an eerily appropriate coincidence, and not merely because he had been influenced by Jonathan Winters and worked with him on Mork and Mindy. I can’t say that it came as a surprise to me. I always found his manic brand of comedy to be disquieting, enough so that I actually wondered early in his career whether he might possibly have suffered from some form of mental illness, though there was never any question of his great gifts.

Seeing Williams play a creepily pitiful bad guy in One Hour Photo left me in no doubt that he had real talent as a dramatic actor, in part because he had immediate access to the feelings of rage and self-loathing that so clearly drove his comedy. Would that he had turned to legitimate theater (he only appeared in two straight plays in New York, Mike Nichols’ 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot and Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) instead of settling for what Hollywood had to offer an aging comedian. Perhaps stage acting, especially in dead-serious comedies like Godot, might have given his anger a cathartic outlet. Instead, it consumed him.

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Louis Armstrong and the All Stars play “Back o’ Town Blues” on the BBC in 1965:

Suzanne Farrell does twenty grand battements on an episode of Sesame Street:

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

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

Thornton Wilder (quoted in Time, Jan. 12, 1953)