Archives for 2014

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a New Jersey show, Two River Theater Company’s revival of Camelot. Here’s an excerpt.

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Does the old-fashioned Broadway musical have a future? If so, it may well be found in the scaled-down revivals of classic musicals that are currently being presented by smart theater companies across America. To see a show like Amanda Dehnert’s school-of-Brecht 2013 Oregon Shakespeare Festival version of “My Fair Lady,” or the radically reconceived single-set “Porgy and Bess” that Charles Newell directed at Chicago’s Court Theatre in 2011, is to realize that given sufficient imagination, it’s possible to do complete artistic justice to a golden-age musical in a small house without busting the budget. The latest example is David Lee’s Two River Theater Company production of “Camelot.” Not only is it the best “Camelot” I’ve seen, hands down, but Mr. Lee has succeeded in fixing the inherent flaws of a musical that, for all its popularity, has never quite worked.

The problem with “Camelot,” the Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical version of “The Once and Future King,” T.H. White’s 1958 novel about the legend of King Arthur, is that it’s far too long and elaborate for its own good. Having turned the novel into a big theatrical machine with a cast of 30 that ran for four and a half hours in previews, the two men then hacked an hour and a half out of “Camelot,” and kept chipping away after it opened in 1960. They ended up with a hit. But “Camelot” has never been successfully revived on Broadway, and I’ve always wondered whether it might in fact be an intimate music drama trapped inside an overblown stage spectacular.

Mr. Lee has evidently come to that conclusion, for his performing version of “Camelot,” which runs for just two hours and 15 minutes, is played on a unit set by eight actors and eight musicians. The conceit is a familiar one—we’re seeing “Camelot” done à la “Pippin” by a trunk-toting troupe of youthful strolling players—but Mr. Lee deploys it with immense originality, cutting Lerner’s long-winded book to the bone and letting the songs tell the story. As a result, the spotlight of attention is tightly focused at all times on the ill-fated love triangle of Arthur (Oliver Thornton), Guenevere (Britney Coleman) and Lancelot (Nicholas Rodriguez)…

If you’re going to strip a show like “Camelot” down to the bone, you’d better have a cast that’s strong enough to make an impression without benefit of the lavish scenic trimmings that audiences expect. Ms. Coleman has got what it takes. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a young musical-theater performer with the star quality that she radiates….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Camelot:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I consider the vogue of colorized historical photographs. Here’s an excerpt.

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Once upon a time—a quarter-century ago, to be exact—colorization became a dirty word almost overnight. Ted Turner had been marketing watery-looking “color” versions of popular black-and-white movies, an enterprise that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert labeled “Hollywood’s new vandalism.” Ginger Rogers agreed, declaring that it “feels terrible…to see yourself painted up like a birthday cake on the television screen.” Then, in 1989, Mr. Turner announced plans to colorize “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ masterpiece, and Hollywood’s patience ran out. Leading directors like John Huston and Martin Scorsese declared their opposition to colorization, and before long, Turner Entertainment abandoned the practice.

To this day, the marketing of colorized prints of “Kane” and other classic films of the past is still widely regarded as unacceptable, even unthinkable. Historical photographs, on the other hand, have come to be seen as fair game. Now that digital technology has advanced to the point where it is possible to add convincing-looking color to photos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Internet is awash in electronically tinted portraits of everybody from Anne Frank to Abraham Lincoln….

In the hands of a sensitive, historically knowledgeable artist like Sweden’s Sanna Dullaway, digital colorization can be not merely plausible but positively seductive. To look at Ms. Dullaway’s full-color versions of such familiar photos as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square” side by side with the originals is to appreciate the credo that appears on her website: “No colorized photo can replace the original black-and-white picture, but each will give you a new perspective on how your grandparents and great-grandparents used to see the world. Rather than living in the misty grey world we usually see, the sun shone just as bright, if not more brightly, on them.”

That said, Ms. Dullaway’s colorized photos, as she hastens to admit, are not the real thing. They are, rather, immensely sophisticated recreations—falsifications, if you like—of the past. This was brought home to me when I noticed that colorized historical photographs by Ms. Dullaway and other retouchers were starting to circulate on the web via Twitter. Some are clearly labeled, but most are not, and my guess is that most people, seeing these images for the first time, take it for granted that they are not digital recreations but original color photos.

Does that matter? Or is it old-fogeyism to grumble about a technology that really does bring history to more obviously vivid life? I confess to being both attracted and alarmed by the communicative power of these photos….

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Read the whole thing here.

“There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes.”

Calvin Coolidge, speech on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (July 5, 1926)

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, all performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Love Letters (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 1, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, 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)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Seagull and Sense and Sensibility (drama, PG-13, playing in alternating repertory, closes Dec. 21, reviewed here)

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

“It’s not a trick, it’s a central principle, which is to treat songs like little one-act plays, where you present a situation and then either resolve it or, if you don’t resolve it, move forward so that by the time you’ve finished the song you’re at a different point than you were—in terms of the story, of the show, of the play—so that each song has a function.”

Stephen Sondheim (quoted on Desert Island Discs, Dec. 31, 2000)

Except for the 1990 Al Hirschfeld lithograph of Louis Armstrong that we bought after Satchmo at the Waldorf opened, Mrs. T and I haven’t added anything to the Teachout Museum for quite some time. So it was a very big deal when I learned last month that an art dealer in California was offering for sale a copy of Storm King, a 1918 lithotint by Childe Hassam.

Hassam and John Henry Twachtman were the two most important American impressionist painters, and while Twachtman made only a comparatively small number of prints, Hassam devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to the medium from 1915 until his death in 1935. I don’t care for his etchings, which mostly strike me as fussy and quaint, but his lithographs are far more individual, and “Storm King,” whose subject is the mountain of the same name that overlooks the Hudson River, is one of his finest works in any medium.

As Elizabeth E. Barker wrote in “Hassam’s Prints,” the definitive essay on the subject:

In addition to lithography, Hassam explored the related technique of lithotint, in which the artist uses a brush to apply washes of tusche (a black liquid made of the same materials as the lithographic crayon). Hassam prepared his lithotints—unlike his lithographs—directly on the stone. His last, Storm King, ranks as a masterpiece of the form: the ominous mountains that pierce the cloudy sky and dwarf the miniscule ship may reveal Hassam’s own emotions in wartime….

Today Hassam’s bold late printmaking style may suggest links to modern European art. The powerful linear forms of his lithographs resemble the interlocking planes that structure paintings by Paul Cézanne.

I agree, which is one of the reasons why I have coveted “Storm King” ever since I first saw it reproduced in a catalogue. Not only is it breathtakingly beautiful in its own right, but it fits neatly into our collection of works on paper by America’s midcentury modernists and their turn-of-the-century forerunners. I never dreamed that we would be able to own a copy—only forty-nine impressions were made, most of which are now in museums—but now we do, and Mrs. T and I are planning to hang it close to our treasured copy of Twachtman’s Dock at Newport, one of the very first pieces that I bought after I started collecting American art eleven years ago.

“Storm King” also has special meaning for the two of us because we’ve spent so much time together in the immediate vicinity of Storm King Mountain. I saw that lovely landmark for the first time when I took my second adult vacation in 2004. I took Mrs. T there a few months after we met, and since then we’ve returned nearly every summer. Now we’ll be able to “see” Storm King through the eyes of a great American artist whenever we want, simply by looking at the walls of our Manhattan apartment. That is a privilege I will never take for granted.

PBS aired a well-made, unexpectedly forthright “American Masters” documentary last night that implicitly made the case for Bing Crosby as—among many other things—a jazz singer.

I did the same thing more directly in Commentary in 2001, calling Crosby

a nonpareil jazz singer who has been unfairly written out of the history of the music he helped to shape, as well as a balladeer of magical sensitivity and irresistible vitality….

Musically, Crosby combined [Louis] Armstrong’s infallible swing with [Bix] Beiderbecke’s lyricism. Such early 78 sides as “I’m Coming, Virginia” (1927), “Ol’ Man River” (1928), and “Make Believe” (1928) show him to have been astonishingly light on his rhythmic feet, more so than any singer of the period besides Armstrong. He reworked melodies with the self-assurance of a master improviser, adding ornaments and altering rhythms as his fancy dictated, and his “scat” singing (the made-up nonsense syllables popularized by Armstrong), heard to especially good advantage on the electrifying version of “St. Louis Blues” he recorded with Duke Ellington’s band in 1932, was wonderfully bold.

The young Bing Crosby was, in short, a jazz singer, arguably the first one after Louis Armstrong, and without question one of the best who ever lived….

Read the whole thing here.

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Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz” (written for and originally performed in High Society) on The Edsel Show in 1959:

Bob Hope appears as the mystery guest on “What’s My Line?” on December 12, 1954, and fools Arlene Francis into thinking that he’s…well, watch and see:

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