Archives for 2014

The last time I lived in a house was 1974. The house in question was the one in which I grew up, in which my mother lived from 1961 until her death three years ago, and in which my brother and sister-in-law now live. Since then I’ve wandered from city to city, apartment to apartment, and hotel to hotel, and the word “home,” which used to mean 713 Hickory Drive, Smalltown, U.S.A., now means…what? Wherever Mrs. T happens to be, I suppose, but it’s also true that there are other places in America to which I have developed more transient yet no less potent attachments.

One of them is Lenox, the Massachusetts town to which I’ve gone for the past eight summers to see plays and where I spent three intense weeks in 2012 rehearsing Shakespeare & Company’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my own first play. I arrived in Lenox on July 30, scarcely more than two months after my mother died, and the play opened on August 22. I spent most of the time in between sitting in a rehearsal studio, and when I wasn’t there I was mostly thinking about Satchmo. Even so, I found time to fall in love with the “deep greens and blues” of the Berkshires, the surrounding mountain range to whose beauty James Taylor paid tribute in “Sweet Baby James.” I also came to love and esteem more than a few of my newfound partners in theatrical crime—but once Satchmo opened and I hit the road again, most of them disappeared from my life. Like me, they had places to go and things to do.

That’s how theater works. It generates overwhelming emotions that melt into air each time a show closes and you move on to the next one. (This is one of the reasons why theater people so often embark on the short-lived flings that are known in the profession as “showmances.”) What seemed all-consuming and permanent turns out to have been evanescent, leaving behind nothing but yet another page in your bulging album of memories.

On Monday I returned to Lenox to spend a few days seeing shows, and I wondered how it would feel to be there after so long an absence. The answer, to my surprise, is that it felt like coming home. The mountains were as beautiful as ever, the restaurants as fine, the traffic as exasperating. (The only way to get anywhere fast in the Berkshires is to hop a ride on a fire engine.) The next night I drove over to Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse, the theater where Satchmo at the Waldorf was performed, to see a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was set in New Orleans in the Twenties. Tony Simotes, the director, said in his program note that he’d been inspired by Satchmo. It all felt as familiar as a well-worn pair of slippers…and yet it wasn’t. For I was no longer part of the company, as I had been in 2012: I was, once again, a visitor.

I’ve never been a clubbable person. The only club I’ve ever wanted to join is the Society of People Putting on a Show, into which I was inducted when I acted for the first time in a high-school play, an experience that I described in a memoir of my young years written after I moved to New York:

It was still me on that little stage, and everybody knew it, myself included. But something far more important happened during the six weeks we spent in rehearsal: I got my first taste of the intimacy shared by the cast and crew of a play. We spent long nighttime hours working together in a cavernous building into which no stranger was allowed to set foot. We concentrated intensely on each other on stage and talked endlessly to each other off stage, exchanging the self-conscious confidences of adolescence in the shadowy corners of the gym. After every dress rehearsal and every performance, we drove to Sambo’s, an all-night restaurant on the edge of town, and we went with faces unwashed and makeup intact, that being the badge of membership in the most exclusive fraternity in town.

I rejoined that club several more times in high school and college, then quit it for good when I graduated—or so I thought. It never occurred to me that in middle age I would start writing opera libretti and, later, a play of my own, and that through doing so I would rediscover the very special pleasure of temporarily cutting yourself off from the outside world in order to create an alternate universe of your own.

When the off-Broadway transfer of Satchmo closed at the end of June, I was perforce mustered out of the Society of People Putting on a Show. Only temporarily, I hope, but for the moment I am, as theater people say, a civilian. And as I sat in the Packer Playhouse on Tuesday night, I found myself thinking of the last lines of a different Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which Adriano de Armado draws a bright line between the separate lives of actors and audience: The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.

I had that line (and those lines) in mind when I wrote Louis Armstrong’s curtain speech in Satchmo at the Waldorf:

Well…Lucille’s waiting for me upstairs. Prob’ly wondering how come I took so long to get changed. Got two shows to play tomorrow, gotta take care of myself. Wanna please the people, get you a good night’s sleep. Playing that pretty music every night take a lot out of an old man.

He picks up his trumpet case.

You go that way, I go this way. And we gonna do it all over again tomorrow night. Just like always.

The opening of the All Stars’ 1954 recording of “St. Louis Blues” is heard again. The music echoes in the empty room as he exits, closing the door behind him. Blackout.

Et in Arcadia ego! But just as we cannot follow Armstrong through the dressing-room door into the darkness that swallows him up, so am I unable—for now, anyway—to return to the privileged backstage world that I briefly and ecstatically inhabited two summers ago. All I can do is watch from the aisle, seated among the civilians, wondering if I’ll ever find my way back home again by writing another play or libretto that somebody, somewhere, wants to produce.

And if I don’t? So be it. I love my day job, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. But I also like being able on occasion to pass through the stage door, roll up my sleeves, and help make a show. I suspect that most of us, no matter how much we love our lives, long to take an occasional vacation from them. That’s mine.

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James Taylor sings “Sweet Baby James” on The Johnny Cash Show in 1971:

The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column in today’s paper in which to comment on John Lithgow’s King Lear in New York’s Central Park. Here’s an excerpt.

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How is it that “King Lear,” Shakespeare’s darkest and most challenging drama, has lately become almost popular in a fundamentally optimistic country like America? I’ve seen 13 “Lears” in the past decade, and the floodtide of interest in the plight of the mad old king and his murderously ungrateful daughters shows no signs of slackening. The most persuasive explanation of the play’s vogue is that aging baby boomers on both sides of the proscenium are fascinated by a tragedy that can be plausibly interpreted as hinging on the onrushing senility of its central character. Whatever the reason, the Public Theater is now performing “Lear” in Central Park for the first time since 1973, with a white-bearded John Lithgow—who was born in 1945, at the very start of the boom—in the title role. And while I don’t know anyone who thinks that Mr. Lithgow is a natural Lear, he’s giving a performance so deeply considered and richly realized as to overcome most of the obvious objections to his casting.

Primary among those objections is that save for being unusually tall, Mr. Lithgow is as unregal as an actor can be. He is the quintessential comic WASP, at once haughty and absurd, and he is unfailingly effective in plays in which such folk are brought low, like David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” or David Auburn’s “The Columnist.” But while “Lear” has its moments of black comedy, its anti-hero is nonetheless heroic: He is pitiful, not preposterous.

As a result, Mr. Lithgow is playing at all times against type—and he gets away with it, filling his space with sharply drawn details that carry the sting of surprise. Never before have I seen a Lear who makes it so clear that he wants to be generous to Cordelia, his good daughter (played by Jessica Collins, who is quietly touching), or who articulates with such exactly graded clarity his descent into madness….

So yes, this is a problematic “Lear.” On the other hand, most “Lears” are problematic—that’s in the nature of the play—and the second half in particular is so charged with passion that it will likely sweep you away, reservations notwithstanding….

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Read the whole thing here.

Victoria de los Angeles and Gerald Moore perform Brahms’ “Vergebliches Ständchen” in 1957:

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

“Others find self-expression in the form of writing a cure—but what kind of cure is writing? Give me the disease any day, as Alpdodger said.”

Cyril Connolly, journal entry (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

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: