Archives for February 27, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report from Florida on two very impressive Orlando Shakespeare Theatre productions, To Kill a Mockingbird and Henry V. Here’s an excerpt.

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Now that Harper Lee is back in the news, it’s likely that Christopher Sergel’s workmanlike 1990 stage version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was already a staple of regional theaters throughout America, will be mounted even more frequently than it was in the past quarter-century. Not being a fan of theatrical adaptations of popular novels, I’d hitherto steered clear of it, but the controversy over the discovery of “Go Set a Watchman,” the first draft of “Mockingbird,” made me curious. How would so familiar a book, especially one that was made into an equally well-known film, go over on stage? And when I heard that it was being performed by Florida’s Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, I was even more curious to know how “Mockingbird” would be received in a state where 331 lynchings took place between 1877 and 1950. So I went to see for myself—and was mightily impressed….

The secret ingredient in Orlando Shakespeare’s recipe is the staging of Thomas Ouellette, which is exceptional in every way. For openers, Mr. Ouellette has made sure that his cast does nothing to remind you of the now-iconic performances seen in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film version. Instead of “doing” Gregory Peck, Warren Kelley turns Atticus Finch into a geeky, almost comically earnest small-town lawyer who somehow finds within himself the power to rise to the occasion of defending a black man falsely accused of rape—and it works. Kennedy Joy Foristall’s strident, bratty Scout is similarly idiosyncratic, and the other characters are no less sharply drawn. The dramatic tension in each scene is unobtrusively screwed up to the highest possible pitch….

Orlando Shakespeare Theatre is a puzzlement, a first-class drama company whose stature is too often obscured by unadventurous programming. It’s only because I already knew how good Orlando Shakespeare is that I went out of my way to see its production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Jim Helsinger’s “Henry V” poses a like problem: why bother with yet another revival of a classic that gets done so very often? The answer is that this is an extraordinarily fine small-scale production of a supremely great history play, performed on an open stage in a 118-seat theater by six men and two women, all of them outstanding. Everyone in the cast plays double or triple roles, even John P. Keller, who is both grippingly incisive as young Henry and preposterously foppish as the Dauphin. Mr. Helsinger’s staging is propelled by a strong comic energy that is never allowed to undercut the high seriousness of the proceedings….

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To read my complete review of To Kill a Mockingbird, go here.

To read my complete review of Henry V, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I take note of a group of “rediscovered” works of art from the past, and speculate on their larger cultural significance. Here’s an excerpt.

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The top story in the fine-art business is the “rediscovery” (if that’s the word—they were never lost) of a pair of privately owned bronze sculptures on display at England’s Fitzwilliam Museum. A team of art historians now thinks they were handmade by Michelangelo, the “Last Judgment” man. Should this new attribution stand up to scholarly scrutiny, they will be, so far as is known, the only surviving Michelangelo bronzes in the world.

Such tales are catnip to the press, which can be counted on to give them lavish play, as was the case when a previously unknown sonata movement composed in 1767 by the 11-year-old Mozart turned up three years ago in an Austrian attic. Much the same thing happened the other day when Random House, Dr. Seuss’ longtime publisher, announced that his widow had stumbled across a box containing the manuscript of an unpublished book by the popular children’s author called “What Pet Should I Get?” It’s being rushed into print, and will hit bookstores on July 28, two weeks after the publication of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the hitherto unknown first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

What is it about stories like these that we find so unfailingly seductive? No doubt the “Antiques Roadshow” mentality is part of it. All of us love to suppose that the dusty canvas that Aunt Tillie left to us in her will is in fact an old master whose sale will make us rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And I’m sure that the fast-growing doubts surrounding “Go Set a Watchman” (which were well summarized in a Feb. 16 Washington Post story bearing the biting title of “To Shill a Mockingbird”) have pumped up its news value considerably.

But I smell something else in play. I suspect that for all its seeming popularity—as measured by such indexes as museum attendance—there is a continuing and pervasive unease with modern art among the public at large, a sinking feeling that no matter how much time they spend looking, reading or listening, they’ll never quite get the hang of it. As a result, they feel a powerful longing for “new” work by artists of the past.

To be sure, most ordinary folks like at least some modern art, but they gravitate more willingly to traditional fare. Just as “Our Town” (whose form, lest we forget, was ultramodern in 1938) is more popular than “Waiting for Godot,” so, too, are virtually all of our successful “modern” novels essentially traditional in style and subject matter. In some fields, domestic architecture in particular, midcentury modernism is still a source of widespread disquiet, while in others, like classical music and dance, the average audience member does little more than tolerate it. Shakespeare, Beethoven and “Swan Lake” remain to this day the cash cows of the American performing arts….

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Read the whole thing here.

Mozart’s Allegro Molto in C Major, a freestanding sonata movement discovered in 2012 and played by Florian Birsak on the composer’s own fortepiano:

“And, above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington