Archives for 2014

No, Zephyr Teachout and I are not related, at least so far as we know. Yes, we are good friends. (In fact, we call one another “Cuz” for fun.) I sought her out a number of years ago after running across her name in a news story, and we discovered at once that we liked each other. (Mrs. T likes her, too.) We go to the theater together whenever our schedules overlap. Yes, we disagree about a lot of things. No, that doesn’t matter in the least bit to either of us.

Satisfied?

UPDATE: And yes, I have lots of trans-ideological friendships. How about you?

One more thing: as long as you’re here, why not read something else?

Mrs. T and I took a friend to see Satchmo at the Waldorf on Friday. An unusually large and responsive crowd showed up, and John Douglas Thompson fed off its excitement. He always gives a good performance—I’m awed by his consistency—but he was flying that night. Every line landed and every detail registered.

The response at evening’s end reminded me of the scene in Satchmo in which Louis Armstrong describes what happened the first time he sang “Hello, Dolly!” in public:

Everybody there, they go ooooh! All at once, just like that. And when we finished, they start yelling. Not clapping—yelling. Like they gonna tear the house down. And I lean over to the piano player and I say, “I do believe they like it.”

No doubt John was intensely aware, as I was, of the fact that the New York run of Satchmo will end on Sunday afternoon. While I have reason to expect that the show will be produced in other cities, and that John will perform it in at least some of those cities, it’s still going to be tough to ring down the figurative curtain (Satchmo, like most modern plays, doesn’t have an actual curtain) on the final performance.

In a manner of speaking, I’ll also be ringing down the curtain on the 2013-14 season, which for me was quite a year. Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington was published in October, a week after the Louisville premiere of The King’s Man, my third operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec. Satchmo opened in New York in March, and I received the Bradley Prize last week.

In 2009 I had occasion to recall in this space the opening lines of one of my favorite movies, My Favorite Year: “Nineteen fifty-four. You don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year.” I reminded myself at the time that anyone as lucky as I’d just been “has no business complaining about anything whatsoever. Today I’m as thankful as it’s possible to be, and I hope I have the good sense to remain so for some time to come.”

Would that such gratitude were more firmly rooted in man’s psyche! Alas, I fear it’s not in our natures to recall such high-minded sentiments for very long. La Rochefoucauld, that cynic of cynics, actually went so far as to claim that “the gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits.” Maybe so, maybe not, but it’s certainly true that we must perpetually remind ourselves to be grateful, which is why we celebrate Thanksgiving each year. Yet as wistful as it will surely feel fo me to watch John perform Satchmo at the Waldorf one last time on the stage of New York’s Westside Theatre, I don’t think I’ll need any such reminders, at least not for a while.

Mrs. T and I are celebrating our good fortune by taking two weeks off, something we haven’t done for a long time. My Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal is already written and filed, and we’re heading out to one of our secret hideaways this afternoon. We’ll be driving into New York just long enough to see the final performance of Satchmo, and since next Friday is July 4, I won’t be writing a column that day. As always, this blog will continue to operate, but otherwise I’ll be on ice.

We’ll be back on July 7. Wave if you see us passing by.

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Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars perform “Hello, Dolly!” on stage in Paris in 1965:

When I went to see Satchmo at the Waldorf on Friday, a middle-aged woman sitting in the center of the second row pulled out her cellphone midway through the performance and spent five minutes checking her e-mail. The upstairs auditorium of the Westside Theatre is steeply raked, meaning that the phone was clearly visible to most of the audience—and the light that it emitted made the woman in question just as visible to John Douglas Thompson, who was standing in front of her.

“I thought of chewing her out in character,” John told me after the show. “It didn’t matter which character I was playing—I could have cussed her out as Satchmo, Joe Glaser, or Miles Davis. The only thing that stopped me was that I was afraid I’d go up in my lines. Otherwise I would have given her hell.”

“If I’d been sitting behind her, I would have given her hell,” I replied. As for Mrs. T, she was too busy spluttering with rage to put in her two cents’ worth.

I’ve seen a fair amount of uncivil behavior in theaters over the years, so it takes a lot to make me boggle—but that did it. To check your e-mail in the middle of a performance is rude no matter where you’re sitting. To do it when you’re fifteen feet away from the stage upon which a one-man play is being performed is unforgivable.

The most effective turn-off-your-cellphones announcement I’ve ever heard preceded a performance by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. It went like this: Turn off your ******* phones. (I’ll let you fill in the blank.)

Short of that extremity, I doubt that any pre-show announcement, no matter how clever, will persuade the boors among us to clean up their act. The time, then, has come for an unrelentingly aggressive campaign of public shaming. From now on, I swear to chew out on the spot any playgoer whom I catch using a cellphone in the middle of a performance. So should you. So should we all—and so should every stage actor in America.

The next time it happens to John, I want him to stop the show cold, point at the offender, and say, “I can see that you’re using a cellphone. That’s inconsiderate and disrespectful, not just to me but to everyone who bought a ticket to the show. So please turn it off—right now—or one of the ushers will escort you out of the theater.”

That’ll shut ’em down.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the finale of Haydn’s Eighty-Eighth Symphony—without using his hands:

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

“From Walter there came an aura, a warm triumphant glow that made Jeffrey wonder whether all triumphs were not the same and whether the solace which anyone derived from them might not be based upon some half-forgotten slight.”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two New York shows, Holler if Ya Hear Me and Much Ado About Nothing. Here’s an excerpt.

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Thirty-five years after the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” the first full-fledged rap record, Broadway finally has its very own hip-hop jukebox musical. “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” whose score consists of 21 songs by Tupac Shakur, is (says the publicist) “a non-biographical story about friendship, family, revenge, change and hope.” The presumptive reason why it’s “non-biographical” is because the producers don’t own the rights to Mr. Shakur’s life story. Whether they sought to acquire those rights isn’t known, but “Holler if Ya Hear Me” would likely have been more interesting if they had.

In addition to being a popular rapper, Mr. Shakur was—to put it mildly—a piece of work. Born in 1971 to a pair of Black Panthers, he made his stage debut at 12 in a Harlem production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” cut his first solo album in 1991 (Dan Quayle denounced it), made his first movie in 1992, did time for “first-degree sexual assault” in 1995 and was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. His murderers were never found.

That’s a story I’d pay to see. Not so Todd Kreidler’s book for “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” a thrice-told tale of ghetto life that’s full of carbon-copied dialogue (“I always wanted you to be good—good in ways I wasn’t”) and ends with a violent denouement close enough to “West Side Story” to be actionable. This may explain why Kenny Leon’s staging of the show’s dialogue scenes is so slackly paced: He had nothing to work with.

The songs are another matter altogether, though it should be said up front that Daryl Waters, who is credited with “music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements,” has in fact transformed many of Mr. Shakur’s spoken monologues into something more like traditional theatrical songs, adding melodically fleshed-out choral parts and laying the lyrics on top of sophisticated, jazz-flavored accompaniments played by a first-class pit band. The idea, I assume, was to make the score more immediately accessible to Broadway audiences. It works, too: “Holler” is one of the best-sounding new musicals to come to Broadway in quite some time. That said, the hardest-hitting songs, like the title tune, are usually the ones that most closely resemble Mr. Shakur’s plainer recorded performances….

Jack O’Brien, lately of “The Nance,” has made his Shakespeare in the Park debut with an undemanding, thoroughly amiable staging of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater play Beatrice and Benedick, both of whom affect to hold marriage in contempt but succumb (after much friendly skullduggery) to its charms. Appropriately enough, Mr. O’Brien has given us an al fresco reworking of Shakespeare’s play in which the action is updated to Sicily circa 1900. It’s an eminently logical transposition, and John Lee Beatty, the set designer, has made it even more plausible by erecting on the stage of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater a sun-kissed villa whose accoutrements include a working fountain, a climbable orange tree and a vegetable patch…

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To read my review of Holler if Ya Hear Me, go here.

To read my review of Much Ado About Nothing, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I outline my plan for a compulsory year-long nationwide high-school course called “The American Experience in Art.” In lieu of an excerpt from the column, here are the works on my proposed syllabus:

• Two full-length novels, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

• One short novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

• Two plays, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

• A selection of poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes

• One group of paintings, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, studied in conjunction with a selection of recordings by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington

• One dance, Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (music by Aaron Copland)

• One musical, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (choreography by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)

• Three films, John Ford’s The Searchers, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (music by Bernard Herrmann) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives

Read the whole thing here.

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A 1959 performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company of Appalachian Spring:

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning