Archives for 2014

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:
• Bullets Over Broadway (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, many performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• When We Were Young and Unafraid (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 10, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• The Dance of Death (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Juno (musical, PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Days Like Today (musical, PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Devil’s Disciple (serious comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:
• Last of the Red Hot Lovers (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• The Cripple of Inishmaan (serious comedy, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

“My reading habits have not changed over the years, only my eyesight has changed. I don’t like being indoors and get out every chance I get. In order to read, one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.”

E.B. White, Paris Review interview, Fall 1969 (courtesy of Michael Greenspan)

Mrs. T and I drove up to Ontario yesterday to see four plays at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of the prettiest and most pleasant places I know, a preternaturally neat town where the lawns look as though they were trimmed three times a day and you can’t get a bad meal unless you go out of your way to find it.

I paid my first professional visit to Canada in 2009. Since then I’ve returned to see shows every summer, both because Canadian theater is excellent and because I find the country itself to be so agreeable—and interesting. My interest, which has ripened into outright fascination, dates from my reading of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. Part of what fascinates me is that Canada looks and sounds deceptively like its southern neighbor, but is nonetheless, as I first learned from Wilson, a very different place with a strongly distinctive and self-conscious identity of its own.

To read an article like this is to be made acutely aware of the extent to which some Canadians define that identity in terms of not being American. As Mike Myers famously said, “Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavor—we’re more like celery as a flavor.”

As I wrote during my first visit to Canada:

I’ve been walking around town each afternoon in search of impressions. Mostly I’m struck by how similar Canada is to America—and how intensely aware it is of its neighbor to the south. While I have no doubt that surface appearances are deceiving, it’s also true that every other story I read in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, is either about the United States or makes prominent reference to it….

The main thing I’ve noticed since arriving on Sunday is that everyone here seems to be nice. Granted, I’ve yet to meet a Canadian I didn’t like, but the unfailing agreeability of the people whom I’ve encountered in Stratford suggests that niceness might well be a component of the Canadian national character.

To be sure, I would never dream of generalizing with any authority about Canada based on a handful of visits. On the other hand, I have a fair number of close friends who come from there, and they all have two things in common: they are nice without exception and conspicuously ill at ease about tooting their own horns. Anyone who decides to live and work in this country is by definition self-selected for ambition, yet just about every Canadian expatriate I know is diffident to the point of shyness when it comes to acting decisively on that ambition.

I discovered Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, my favorite Canadian novel, in 2008, and found it unusually revealing on this score. In it MacLennan refers to Canada as a “cautious country which had always done more than she had promised, had always endured in silence while others reaped the glory.” That sentence describes most of my Canadian friends to the letter.

As far as the deceptive similarities go, they’re sometimes so conspicuous as to be downright amusing. At breakfast this morning I heard two young women conversing merrily in the nasal yap-speak that is characteristic of American women of their age: “Yah. Yah. That’s AHH-some. Yah.” Were it not for their unmistakable Canadian accents, I would have taken them to be from Los Angeles.

But Niagara-on-the-Lake is not—to put it mildly—Los Angeles, and though the Shaw Festival is one of the finest theatrical enterprises of its kind in North America, it’s not nearly so well known in the United States as it ought to be, perhaps because it’s…well, Canadian. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy coming here so much, just as I love my Canadian friends in part because they are so very Canadian, and so very unlike me.

* * *

UPDATE: To read Mordecai Richler’s 1965 review of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada, go here.

Glenn Gould’s Toronto, originally telecast by the CBC in 1979:

Julius Katchen plays two of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances on French TV. Katchen, a renowned specialist in the music of Brahms, died of cancer in 1969 at the age of 42:

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

“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”

A.J. Liebling, The Honest Rainmaker (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

Yesterday I wrote about the limits of nostalgia, which put me in mind of the fact that I graduated from high school in 1974, the year that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and Gerald Ford succeeded (and pardoned) him. To put these latter events in historical perspective, I’m as far away from them now as I was in 1974 from the killing of Bonnie and Clyde.

Here are some other things that happened in 1974:

• One hundred seventy-eight American soldiers were killed in action in Vietnam.

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from there to Canada.

• The Episcopal Church ordained its first women priests.

• Chicago’s Sears Tower was opened, becoming the world’s tallest building.

• Ernő Rubik invented Rubik’s Cube.

• Arpad and Giorgio Fischer invented liposuction.

• Art Fry of 3M invented the Post-It Note. (The company’s records, strangely enough, make no mention of Romy White or Michele Weinberger.)

• Henry Heimlich published an article describing what came to be known as the “Heimlich maneuver.”

• Barcodes were first used to sell products in stores.

• People magazine was launched.

• The number-one hit single was Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting.” The year’s top-selling album was Band on the Run, by Paul McCartney and Wings. The record-of-the-year Grammy went to Roberta Flack for “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”

• The top-rated American TV series was All in the Family.

• The top-grossing (!) American film was Blazing Saddles.

• The best-picture Oscar went to The Sting.

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus went off the air in England and was shown for the first time in this country by KERA-TV, Dallas’ PBS affiliate.

• W.H. Auden’s Forewords and Afterwords, Peter Benchley’s Jaws, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Pauline Kael’s Deeper into Movies, Stephen King’s Carrie, Philip Larkin’s High Windows, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (the last Jeeves novel) were published.

• Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties were written. The best-play Tony went to Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger.

• No Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in fiction or drama.

• Dmitri Shostakovich composed his fifteenth and last string quartet.

• Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime home-run record. (He held the record until Barry Bonds passed him in 2007.)

• Amy Adams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jimmy Fallon, and Miranda July were born.

• Jack Benny, Duke Ellington, Charles Lindbergh, Sam Goldwyn, Darius Milhaud, and Ed Sullivan died.

• The U.S. unemployment rate was 5.3%.

• A McDonald’s Big Mac cost sixty-five cents, $3.14 in today’s dollars. (The same sandwich now costs, on average, $4.62 in the U.S.)

• A movie ticket cost, on average, $1.87.

• A gallon of regular gas cost, on average, fifty-three cents.

• A first-class postage stamp cost ten cents.

* * *

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke speaks in 1974 about what the world will be like in 2001:

From 2004:

To memorize something effectively, you have to expend some interpretive effort on it, and with this effort you wind up in something like a conversation with the text. Grasping at least the literal meaning–not necessarily as easy as you might think, I’ve learned in my teaching–is the most efficient way of mastering a poem, so you can’t help but learn something more than just the words in the process. And the richer the text, the more there is to absorb. It’s sad that such a truly mind-expanding practice has been saddled with a reputation as just the opposite….

Read the whole thing here.

“The likelihood of typographical errors in spite of rigorous proofreading was going to be the subject of an essay that he would write one day, Vic thought. There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man’s existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.”

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water (courtesy of Levi Stahl)