Archives for August 2014

From 2004:

I’m not funny, and wish I were. Witty, yes, sometimes, and I’m pretty good at making an audience laugh when lecturing (a situation in which the prevailing standards are admittedly fairly low). But plain old drop-dead funny? Absolutely not. The only time I ever brought down a house was when I contrived to be hit in the face with a cream pie in front of an audience of pubescent classmates who thought they were going to be forced to listen to me give a prize-winning speech as part of a talent contest. That stopped the show. Short of such skullduggery, though, I lacked the power to impose my personality on a crowd, and still do. As a naughty but honest colleague said of Leopold Godowsky, a legendary turn-of-the-century pianist who was miraculous in the studio but dull in the concert hall, my aura extends for about five feet. This incapacity has made it hard for me to be funny and impossible for me to be either an actor or a conductor, two professions toward which I was briefly drawn when I was young and foolish….

Read the whole thing here.

“If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare’s intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.”

Thomas Carlyle, “Characteristics of Shakespeare”

This is Louis Armstrong’s one hundred and thirteenth birthday, and he remains as central to American life and culture today as he was when he died in 1971.

I’ve long since said my piece about Satchmo, most recently in Satchmo at the Waldorf and most extensively in Pops, my 2009 biography, which ends like this:

Faced with the terrible realities of the time and place into which he had been born, he did not repine, but returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work. Therein lay the ultimate meaning of his epic journey from squalor to immortality: his sunlit, hopeful art, brought into being by the labor of a lifetime, spoke to all men in all conditions and helped make them whole.

So instead of repeating myself for the umpteenth time, allow me instead to suggest that you spring for a copy of Mosaic Records’ The Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars, a nine-CD box set of performances taped between 1947 and 1958. Contrary to what used to be the critical common wisdom, Armstrong was very near the peak of his powers in the late Forties and Fifties, the years when he gave up his big band and started fronting a small, hand-picked combo of wholly compatible sidemen. This set, in which he can be heard playing and singing in the company of such giants of jazz as Barney Bigard, Sid Catlett, Bobby Hackett, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle, Jack Teagarden, and Trummy Young, is a gloriously festive collection of live recordings from that decade that will leave you in no possible doubt of his enduring greatness. It was assembled, and the superlative liner notes written, by Ricky Riccardi, the well-known Armstrong blogger and biographer, and if it doesn’t win him a Grammy Award, there is no justice in this world.

The Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars costs $149. It’s worth twice that, at least.

P.S. The Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, which is normally closed on Mondays, is open today in honor of the occasion. If you’ve never made a pilgrimage to the great man’s home, you should hasten to do so. Go here to find out how to get there.

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Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform On the Sunny Side of the Street on CBS in 1958. This is my favorite film of Armstrong in performance:

Ira Glass stirred up a teapot tempest last week when he came home from a preview of the Public Theater’s new production of King Lear, in which John Lithgow plays the title character, and informed the world via Twitter that “Shakespeare sucks.” To which I replied, “When you tell us that Shakespeare ‘sucks,’ you’re telling us about your limitations, not his.”

It says a lot about the state of postmodern American culture that a public figure like Glass should have felt comfortable saying something like that. Time was, however, when my own limitations were almost as great as his—though even then I knew better than to suppose that Shakespeare was anything less than a supreme genius. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until well into adulthood that I could honestly claim to be other than casually familiar with more than a handful of his best-known plays.

I first became aware of Shakespeare through Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of Romeo and Juliet, which I saw when it came out in 1968. It made a big impression on me, one that I suspect that had at least as much to do with the decorous nude scene (I was twelve years old and had never seen anything more revealing than a lingerie ad) as with the play itself. Be that as it may, Romeo bowled me over, and under different circumstances it might have changed my life on the spot.

But Shakespeare wasn’t taught in the small-town public schools that I attended, and I didn’t have the opportunity to see any of his plays performed on stage, either, living as I did in southeast Missouri. Nor could I see them on television other than sporadically: PBS was still in its cradle, and even if it had been airing a Shakespeare play every month, it wouldn’t have mattered, since we didn’t get it in Smalltown, U.S.A. (Yes, I’m older than cable TV.) Hence my second encounter with the Bard didn’t come until two years later, when NBC telecast Richard Chamberlain’s Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version of Hamlet, and while I barely recall having watched it, I remember nothing about it. I doubt that any fourteen-year-old is ready for Hamlet.

I started reading Shakespeare in earnest in college, and I also saw Laurence Olivier’s film versions of Hamlet and Henry V and, a few years later, Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Much Ado About Nothing. Still, my most consequential post-Zeffirelli encounters with Shakespeare were with Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff and George Balanchine’s ballet version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all of which had become vitally important to me long before I finally got around to seeing the plays on which they were based.

By then I’d moved to New York, which made it possible for me to see Shakespeare on stage more often. In 1999 I started writing a monthly column for the Washington Post about the arts in New York, and the Bard naturally figured in my reports. But it wasn’t until I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal in 2003, at the well-ripened age of forty-seven, that I finally began to see Shakespeare’s plays regularly and systematically, and to embrace them with the boundless passion of the adult convert.

It wasn’t that I didn’t already love Shakespeare. I did, very much so. But no matter how many times you’ve read King Lear or Macbeth or The Tempest, you don’t really know it until you’ve seen (and heard) it on stage. Moreover, it’s only after looking at several different stagings that you start to peel away the obscuring layers of imaginative preconception that separate you from the play itself, and realize how much Shakespeare still has to teach us about ourselves. Far from not being “relatable,” as Ira Glass claims, his plays are as true to life as…well, a This American Life piece.

As I wrote in a 2007 Journal column called “Shakespeare the Relevant”:

It happens that I’ve reviewed five different productions of “Lear” since becoming the Journal’s drama critic in 2003. One was great, one very good, one dullish, one bad and one excruciatingly awful—and all were completely different. The Actors’ Shakespeare Project of Boston (that was the great one) performed “Lear” on a bare-bones set that looked as though it had been blown into the theater by a hurricane. Chicago’s Goodman Theatre (that was the awful one) turned it into a hyper-politicized parable of late capitalism whose opening scene was set in a men’s room. In between these extremes were a Mesopotamian “Lear,” a 17th-century “Lear” and an uncategorizably silly “Lear” set in what looked like the stairwell of a modern-art museum. The only thing these five productions had in common was that the same words were spoken by the actors. Yet each of them—even the awful one—was so brusquely immediate in its impact that it might have come straight off the front page of today’s tabloids.

Recall, if you will, what happens in “King Lear”: A half-senile patriarch signs away his property to a pair of greed-crazed daughters who throw him out of the house as soon as the ink dries on the deeds of trust. Stunned, he loses his mind, shortly followed by his life. Wasn’t Katie Couric telling you about that just the other day?

I’ve seen eight more Lears since then, and every one of them, good and bad alike, has enriched my understanding of the play. And while I wish I’d gotten to know Lear and Macbeth and The Tempest long before I did, it might well be that coming to Shakespeare late—and initially getting to know his work through the refracting prisms of film, music, and dance—has made it easier for me to see him plain in middle age.

Would that Ira Glass were as open to that transforming experience as I was! Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn that Shakespeare was smarter than you are, and to partake of his illimitable understanding of man’s endlessly complex nature. If he “sucks,” then so does life.

UPDATE: I received the following response to this posting on Twitter:

YOU inspired me to go to my 1st Shakespeare play, Othello (2005). Have seen 24 works (32 productions) since. Evermore thanks. You gave me a whole world. I bless you every time the house lights go down. I will always be grateful.

“I can’t tell you how touched I am to read this,” I replied. “No drama critic could ask for more.”

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From Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet, John McEnery performs the Queen Mab monologue:

From Verdi’s Falstaff, Tito Gobbi sings “L’onore! Ladri!” The text was adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry IV by Arrigo Boito:

From George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set to the music of Felix Mendelssohn, La Scala Ballet’s Alessandra Ferri and Camillo Di Pompo dance the Titania-Bottom pas de deux:

Jonathan Winters improvises on a 1964 episode of The Jack Paar Program, using a stick as his only prop:

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

“If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.”

William Hazlitt, “On the Ignorance of the Learned”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I file the second of two consecutive reports from Ontario’s Shaw Festival, this one about a pair of important revivals, Edward Bond’s The Sea and Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story. Here’s an excerpt.

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Prolific and controversial in equal measure, Britain’s Edward Bond is esteemed in France but rarely performed in his native land, much less on this side of the Atlantic. Hence Canada’s Shaw Festival, which is best known for producing plays by George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, has done the English-speaking theater a signal service by reviving “The Sea,” Mr. Bond’s 1973 “comedy” (that’s what he calls it, anyway) about a seaside village run by a rich, imperious old gorgon (Fiona Reid) whose high-handed behavior has turned one of the locals (Patrick Galligan) into a conspiracy theorist of the wilder-eyed variety—an Edwardian John Bircher, if you will, who hides his lunacy behind a village shopkeeper’s cringing obsequiousness.

Mr. Bond, in the manner of most modern British playwrights, is a man of the left, and “The Sea,” which dates from the dawning of the Age of Thatcher, can be read as a portrait of class warfare among the provincials. But like Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, his masters, Mr. Bond is too much the artist to content himself with coarse ideological parallels. Instead he turns his imagination loose, and the result is a midnight-black comedy that whipsaws the viewer between uproarious small-town satire and a stoicism so bleak and astringent (“The years go very quickly and you seem to be spared the minutes”) that it makes your skin tingle.

Eda Holmes’ staging is nothing short of remarkable, a small-scale presentation so tightly unified and subtly poetic as to recall David Cromer’s landmark revival of “Our Town.” As for Mr. Galligan, his acting is at once comically demented and utterly terrifying, a mixture that’s guaranteed to chill you…

Philip Barry’s sky-high comedies of white-shoe manners used to be box-office magic. But his reputation took a nosedive after his death in 1949, and not only have none of his plays received a major production in this country since 1995, but only two of them, “Holiday” and “The Philadelphia Story,” have ever been revived on Broadway. I had to travel to Canada to finally see a Barry play: The Shaw Festival is giving “The Philadelphia Story” the deluxe treatment, with Moya O’Connell in the Katharine Hepburn-created part of Tracy Lord, the heiress-divorcée from Philadelphia’s Main Line who finds herself torn between three suitors, one of them her ex-husband (Gray Powell), on the eve of her second marriage.

Does “The Philadelphia Story” work onstage? Absolutely, enough so that I came away even more eager to see Barry’s other plays. What’s more, Dennis Garnhum’s staging is clear and confident, while William Schmuck’s triple-turntable set is positively spectacular. The problem is that George Cukor’s 1940 film version, in which Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart were all in flawless form, is one of a handful of successful Hollywood adaptations of important American stage plays that closely track the scripts on which they’re based. Yes, it’s fascinating to see how well “The Philadelphia Story” plays in its original form, but you won’t learn much about it that you didn’t already know from having seen the movie….

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To read my review of The Sea, go here.

To read my review of The Philadelphia Story, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I consider the PBS Fall Arts Festival 2014. Here’s an excerpt.

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Fifty years ago, New York’s fine-arts institutions set the tone for the arts in America to an extent that is unimaginable now. One of the reasons for their collective dominance, of course, was that some of them didn’t have a whole lot of competition: Regional dance, opera and theater were still in their cradles in 1964. But even the major regional museums and symphony orchestras that already existed in abundance had yet to become truly national institutions. In fact, most of them were all but unknown outside their home cities. Why? Because the national news media largely ignored their activities. Yes, the three commercial TV networks, not to mention Time and Life and Newsweek, devoted quite a bit of time and space to the fine arts in the early ‘60s—but they all operated out of Manhattan, and so they mostly concentrated on covering the great New York-based arts organizations with which they were surrounded.

Today you can find first-rate art from coast to coast—but the national media no longer cover the fine arts other than sporadically in New York, much less elsewhere in the U.S. That’s where PBS is supposed to come in. Its mandate, President Lyndon Johnson said, was “to enrich man’s spirit,” and throughout most of its history it did so by devoting a significant part of its schedule to the fine arts.

And how does it do so today? Last week PBS announced its new Arts Fall Festival lineup. Paula Kerger, the network’s president and CEO, has been playing it ultra-safe ever since, in 2011, she launched the Fall Festival, PBS’ flagship arts-programming venture. I surveyed the first year’s shows and found them to be “a stiff dose of the usual safety-first pledge-week fare.” I hoped back then that things might improve over time, but the entries for 2014 are even blander and more predictable….

Note well what is missing from the Fall Festival lineup: It includes no ballet or modern dance, no classic theater, no real jazz, no opera save for “Porgy” and no classical music of any kind. Moreover, the nine programs barely hint at the nationwide scope of American art: Of the eight performance-based shows in the series, all but three were taped in New York….

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Read the whole thing here.

To read the official press release announcing the PBS Fall Arts Festival 2014, go here.