Archives for November 2014

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Classic Stage Company’s revival of Allegro. Here’s an excerpt.

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Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote nine Broadway musicals together, six of which were hits that continue to be produced around the world. The other three were flops, and two of them, “Me and Juliet” and “Pipe Dream,” have vanished from the stage, leaving behind only their original-cast albums. “Allegro” is different. While everybody agrees that it doesn’t work, there’s been no shortage of attempts to fix “Allegro,” none of which has been any more successful than the original 1947 production, which closed after 315 performances—a major disaster by the money-coining standards of “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific.”

Now Classic Stage Company has decided to take a shot at “Allegro,” and John Doyle, who brought “Sweeney Todd” back to Broadway in 2005 to triumphant effect and staged the CSC’s eloquent small-scale 2013 off-Broadway revival of “Passion,” has been invited to see what he can do to make it work. The answer, alas, is nothing: Mr. Doyle’s production is as unsuccessful as every previous attempt to breathe life into “Allegro.”

Why, then, does anyone ever try to revive so palpably flawed a show? Because “Allegro” looks so good—on paper. It is, in fact, the first “experimental” musical, a show in which Hammerstein threw out the how-to-succeed-on-Broadway rulebook that he and Rodgers had written and tried to come up with something different, using a quasi-Greek chorus that sings to help tell the story of Joe (Claybourne Elder), an Everyman-like small-town doctor who moves to the big, bad city to seek his fortune and comes close to losing his soul along the way….

The main reason for its inability to hold an audience is that the score is pleasant enough but almost entirely unmemorable. Only one song, “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” became a standard, and deservedly so. It’s an angry lament whose sharp-edged lyrics might almost have been written by Lorenz Hart, Rodgers’ previous collaborator: “The gentleman’s eyes are blue,/But little do they see—/Why am I beating my brains out?/He doesn’t belong to me!” The other numbers don’t begin to approach its excellence….

Scarcely less troublesome, though, is Hammerstein’s book, which is both sentimental to a fault (“Gosh! Is everybody in this town going to have their babies today?”) and so relentlessly linear as to be devoid of surprise…

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Read the whole thing here.

Nellie McKay sings “The Gentleman Is a Dope”:

“People born and raised in New Orleans only move if they’re forced to.”

Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues

Courtesy of Patrick Kurp, L.E. Sissman on Thanksgiving:

Then, of course—the larder bare, the slate wiped clean—the hope is free to start. Once our attention has been distracted from the screaming, constant claims of self, we can begin again from square one of our humble, real, deflated self. We suddenly have time—for the first time in a year—for pity that is not coextensive with ourselves. We have time to stop taking others for granted or for pawns in our personal politics and to see them, objectively and shamingly, as more steadfast and less self-blandished than we are. We have time to pay our respects, our too-long-deferred tributes, to the people who have sheltered and nurtured us in spite of our pretensions….

Read the whole thing here.

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, virtually 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)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• This Is Our Youth (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Seagull and Sense and Sensibility (drama, PG-13, playing in alternating repertory, closes Dec. 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Our Lady of Kibeho (drama, PG-13, reviewed here, extended through Dec. 14)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Indian Ink (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“A prompt man is a lonely man.”

Andrew Donahue (quoted in Elmore Leonard, Unknown Man #89)

A rare film clip of Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 30, 1947:

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

“What is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back—his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

From 2003:

If Hitler’s artistic gifts were modest, he nonetheless acquired from his hands-on experience an intimate knowledge of the expressive power of art, and it is at least conceivable that, given sufficient encouragement, he might have used that knowledge in innocent ways. He could have become an architectural painter—or, given his passionate interest in Wagner, a stage designer, another discipline in which he briefly dabbled. Instead, he found a way to put his aesthetic bent to more practical and far-reaching use.

As a politician, Hitler had a near-infallible grasp of theatrical technique. In addition to meticulously rehearsing his speeches, he was painstaking about controlling the environments in which he delivered them. Once he came to power, he created unprecedentedly spectacular, large-scale “stage settings” for his performances, frequently designing the key elements himself. “I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet,” one onlooker wrote of a Nazi-party rally in Nuremberg, “but in grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it.” (A latter-day admirer of Hitler’s technique is the rock star David Bowie, who has observed that the German dictator “was no politician, he was a great media artist….He made an entire country a stage show.”)

Hitler did more than use aesthetic techniques for propaganda purposes. For him, the whole point of ruling Germany and conquering Europe was to be able to make them over again in a different image—one in which the fine arts would have pride of place….

Read the whole thing here.