Archives for October 2014

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I’m the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. But what if you run a company I haven’t visited? How might you lure me to come see you for the first time?

Here is an updated version of the guidelines that I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see, along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Get your annual season announcement to me as early as possible. If you send it to me well in advance of the public announcement, I promise to keep it strictly to myself.

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies, not community theaters. In addition, I don’t review dinner theater or children’s theaters. (Sorry, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and that’s where.)

I’m more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and I’m strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season—and two of them have to be serious. I won’t put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The Santaland Diaries is your idea of a daring new play, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven’t yet gotten around to visiting. Alaska and Colorado continue to loom largest, and I’m also way overdue for a repeat visit to Texas, but if you’re doing something exciting in (say) Hawaii, Mississippi, or Montana, I’d be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won’t visit an out-of-town company that I’ve never seen to review a play by an author of whom I’ve never heard. What I look for on a first visit is an imaginative mix of revivals of major plays—including comedies—and newer works by living playwrights whose work I admire. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Edward Bond, Liz Flahive, Brian Friel, John Guare, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, Amy Herzog, David Ives, Kenneth Lonergan, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, and Tom Stoppard.

Regarding the classics, I already see a lot of Shakespeare, so it’s unlikely that you can lure me with Hamlet. You’d do better to try Chekhov or Shaw.

I also have a select list of older shows I’d like to review, many of which fall into the now-unfashionable “well-made” category, that haven’t been revived in New York lately or ever. If you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Chalk Garden, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Side Man, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit (not the musical version), or pretty much anything by Jean Anouilh, S.N. Behrman, Bertolt Brecht, Rachel Crothers, N.C. Hunter, T.S. Eliot, Horton Foote, William Inge, George Kelly, Eugène Ionesco, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, J.B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, or John Van Druten, kindly drop me a line.

Incidentally, I love door-slamming farces, and I’m very specifically interested in seeing large-cast plays that no longer get performed in or near New York for budgetary reasons.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two—especially if I panned them.

In addition, there are shows that I like but have written about more than once in the past few seasons and thus am not likely to seek out again for the next few seasons. Some cases in point: Absurd Person Singular, American Buffalo, Arcadia, Arms and the Man, Blithe Spirit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Glass Menagerie, God of Carnage, Heartbreak House, King Lear, The Liar, The Little Foxes, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Old Times, Our Town, Port Authority, Private Lives, A Raisin in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Trip to Bountiful, Twelve Angry Men, Waiting for Godot, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and You Can’t Take It With You.

• I love musicals. I’m especially interested in covering creatively staged small-scale revivals of the great musicals of the past, and I’m also a great fan of the post-Sondheim “serious” musicals of songwriters like Adam Guettel and Michael John LaChiusa. On the other hand, I loathe what I call “commodity” musicals—i.e., by-the-numbers stage versions of relatively recent hit films—and won’t review them for any reason other than that they’ve come to Broadway, which means that I have to.

• I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city.) If you want me to review your revival of Separate Tables, your best bet is to point out that another theater ten miles away also happens to be doing Lobby Hero that same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to Chicago instead.

• I almost never travel in the spring. Broadway is usually so busy in March and April that I’m not able to go anywhere else to see anything else. If you’re going to put on a show that you think might catch my eye, consider doing it between September and February.

Oh, yes: I’m always looking for shows that open in November or December and run through the middle of January or later. (This allows me to see and stockpile a show, then review it in the famously dead week after New Year’s Day.)

• Web sites matter. A lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you’re doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I’ll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page full of typos suggests the opposite. This doesn’t mean I won’t consider reviewing you—I know appearances can be deceiving—but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON or NOW PLAYING button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area. Like many people, I rely on my GPS unit when driving, so it is essential that this page also include the street address of the theater where you perform. Failure to conspicuously display this address is a hanging offense. (I also suggest that you include a list of recommended restaurants and hotels that are close to the theater—ideally within walking distance.)

• Please omit paper. I discard unread press releases sent via e-mail. Also, don’t send me routine announcements about (say) staff promotions. All I want to see is your season announcement and individual press releases about your shows.

• Write to me here. Don’t use my Wall Street Journal e-mail address. Savvy publicists will also know how to find out my personal e-mail address, and should use it instead.

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I’ve come to see shows solely because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me.

Montgomery Clift appears as the mystery guest on an episode of What’s My Line? originally telecast on January 20, 1963. The panelists are Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Peter Cook and John Charles Daly is the host. Clift appeared on the show to promote his starring role in Freud:

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

“Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

V.S. Pritchett, “Gibbon and the Home Guard” (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

Two magazine pieces of mine have just appeared:

• “Confessions of an Aesthete,” my latest monthly essay for Commentary, is a longer version of the remarks I made in Washington earlier this year after receiving a Bradley Prize:

Not long ago I was introduced to an audience as an “intellectual.” This was a well-meaning choice of word, and a flattering one, but it was slightly off. An intellectual is a person who is mainly interested in ideas. I am an aesthete—a person who is mainly interested in beauty. Nowadays the word aesthete carries with it the musty reek of high Victoriana. Still, there remains no better word to describe the way certain people—people like me—view the world….

Read the whole thing here.

• In National Review, I write about the Library of America’s new omnibus volume containing Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, H.L. Mencken’s three volumes of autobiographical essays:

Being a journalist, I like Newspaper Days best. Nowhere has the experience of seeing your words in print for the first time been better described: “I was up with the milkman the next morning to search the paper, and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as a barrel of brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched.” But all three volumes of the Days books are jammed full of like nuggets, and to start quoting them is to find it exceedingly hard to stop….

Online subscribers can read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the New York premiere of Donald Margulies’ latest play, The Country House. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres. As much as those who work in the theater love seeing themselves turned into more or less fictional characters, such plays run to self-indulgence, and the truer to life they are, the less likely that “civilians” (the theater-world term for outsiders) will understand more than a sliver of the inside-baseball talk with which they’re typically salted. Not so “The Country House,” in which Donald Margulies shows us three tense days in the life of a theatrical family. Far from being self-indulgent, it is one of the most disciplined and satisfying new American plays to reach Broadway in the past decade.

“The Country House” is the kind of play that is too often dismissively described as “well made,” meaning that its structure is straightforward and its dramaturgy conventional (up to and including a stop-press surprise that rings down the second-act curtain with a gasp). Taking as his point of departure Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” Mr. Margulies presents us with six characters whose lives are so tightly interwoven that you all but need a chart to explain how they fit together…

Put them all in the same country house and you have a surefire formula for friction. Much of what happens thereafter is roughly what you’d expect, but Mr. Margulies makes it new by portraying their collective difficulties with just the right mixture of honesty and sympathy….

Daniel Sullivan has staged the play with an ungimmicky simplicity that allows each one to shine in turn—but it is the author who makes them real. If “The Country House” is a backstage drama by virtue of its setting, its actual subject is how the members of a close family can hurt one another without meaning to do so. You needn’t have done time on the far side of the proscenium to know all about that…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from The Country House:

“The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

• Tonight WNET launches Theater Close-Up, a weekly series of plays taped in performance at off-Broadway theaters, with the Mint Theater Company’s revival of John Van Druten’s London Wall, about which I raved earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal:

This witty, glisteningly crafted tale of a quartet of working women and the benighted men for whom they work has a distinctly contemporary flavor, enough that you’ll come away wondering whether Van Druten might deserve credit for inventing the workplace comedy decades before it found favor on TV.

London Wall starts at nine p.m. on Channel 13, with a repeat broadcast on Sunday. Subsequent episodes will start at ten p.m. each Thursday. In addition, Channel 21 will air Theater Close-Up on Mondays at ten-thirty p.m.

No matter when you decide to tune in, I strongly recommend this show.

• I had warm things to say about The Great City, Hilary Gardner’s debut album, when she released it independently last year:

Gardner has a cool, smooth-surfaced voice, one whose clarinet-like timbre is tinged with a quiet note of knowing wryness. She swings effortlessly without making a big deal of it, and she has a knack for hunting down off-center tunes like Tom Waits’ “Drunk on the Moon” and Nellie McKay’s “Manhattan Avenue.” Yet she’s just as adept at making something fresh and surprising out of an oft-heard chestnut like “Autumn in New York” (performed here, needless to say, with the rarely sung verse). The band is outstanding–I was much taken with the discreet but telling use of Jon Cowherd’s Hammond organ and Randy Napoleon’s guitar–and the uncredited charts set off Gardner’s vocals to lovely effect.

Now The Great City has been commercially released by Sunnyside Records, and if you didn’t buy it when I first wrote about Gardner a year ago, you should definitely do so now. Go here to order a copy.

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:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Love Letters (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 1, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• This Is Our Youth (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fatal Weakness (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Indian Ink (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• When We Are Married (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Arms and the Man (comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• The Sea (black comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Wayside Motor Inn (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (serious comedy, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Travesties (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)