Archives for March 13, 2015

This meme made the rounds in 2014:

List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. They do not have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.

Facebook’s Data Science team subsequently analyzed 130,000 status updates that were specifically responsive to this meme. Here were the top ten choices:

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (21.08%)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (14.48%)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (13.86%)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (7.48%)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (7.28%)
The Holy Bible (7.21%)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (5.97%)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (5.82%)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (5.70%)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (5.61%)

To see the top one hundred choices, go here.

To see my own choices as of 2014, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I have next to nothing good to say about the Broadway transfer of The Audience. Here’s an excerpt.

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No Broadway season is complete without at least one glittering piece of sucker bait for Anglophiles. In order to go over big at the box office, the show in question needs to meet as many as possible of the following specifications: The production must have originated in England and should be visibly costly. In addition, the subject matter must be exclusively and conspicuously English. Finally, the cast should feature at least one English actor who is popular on this side of the Atlantic. Do all four of these things and you can’t miss…

Seasoned theatrical handicappers are thus betting on Peter Morgan’s “The Audience,” which has just transferred to Broadway from London’s West End, to finish in the big money. Not only does it star Helen Mirren, but she plays Queen Elizabeth II, and Mr. Morgan’s cast of characters also includes such luminaries as Winston Churchill (Dakin Matthews) and Margaret Thatcher (Judith Ivey). What’s more, the subject matter is so determinedly English that the printed program contains a supplementary flyer identifying the supporting characters for the benefit of historically challenged ticket holders: “Winston Churchill, inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain to victory in World War II.”

Mr. Morgan, who previously wrote “Frost/Nixon” and the screenplay for “The Queen,” specializes in slick confections that are shallowly rooted in matters of fact. This one arises from a premise stated with elephantine simplicity in the opening lines: “Every week the Queen of the United Kingdom has a private audience with her Prime Minister. It is not an obligation. It is a courtesy extended by the Prime Minister to bring Her Majesty up to speed. The meeting takes place in the Private Audience Room located on the first floor of Buckingham Palace.” Aaaand…we’re off! The play consists of made-up portrayals of Queen Elizabeth’s private audiences with eight of her real-life prime ministers, starting with Churchill and ending with David Cameron (Rufus Wright), the present occupant of the post….

What we have here, in short, is an actor’s tour de force, a piece of richly appointed servant porn in which Ms. Mirren changes age and costume instantaneously and in full view of the audience. In the first scene she’s 69 years old, then 25, and so on and so forth. Each scene is a vignette, yet another piece in the great mosaic that is British history, and the fact that the queen’s audiences with her prime ministers always take place behind closed doors allows Mr. Morgan to let his imagination run rampant, there being no primary source material on which he can base his yarn-spinning.

It’s a clever enough premise save for one incapacitating flaw, which is that “The Audience” has no plot. Yes, we watch Queen Elizabeth growing up, and Ms. Mirren impersonates her (as she did in “The Queen”) with total plausibility all along the way. But the result is a stately pageant, not a conflict-driven play, and if you aren’t more than casually familiar with postwar British history, you’ll likely find some of the scenes numbingly hard to follow….

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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s film about the life and work of J.M.W. Turner. Here’s an excerpt.

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Life usually tells the best stories—but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. That’s why so many novelists, filmmakers and playwrights are drawn to fictionalized biography, which at its best can plumb the complexities of a life in ways that aren’t available to even the most accomplished of conventional biographers. Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” tells us more about Huey Long’s fractured character than any existing biography of Louisiana’s most celebrated politician, just as Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” shines a brighter light on the passions and peculiarities of William Randolph Hearst than a well-chosen five-foot shelf of non-fiction books about the man and his times.

Nevertheless, “All the King’s Men” and “Citizen Kane” are works of fiction freely based on fact (even the names were changed) that make no claims to historical accuracy. Explicitly biographical art, by contrast, can be a considerably trickier proposition. Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” and “Frost/Nixon” are fictionalized stage versions of actual occurrences in the lives of well-known men and women—and both of these exceedingly well-manicured plays remind us that dramatization too often amounts to trivialization.

This is never more true than when it comes to films that purport to tell the story of a creative artist’s life. (Two words: Cole Porter.) But if you want to see a biopic about an artist that gets everything right—and one that is also a major work of art in its own right—then make haste to seek out “Mr. Turner,” Mike Leigh’s film about the man widely and rightly thought to be England’s greatest painter….

Except for “Topsy-Turvy,” Mr. Leigh’s identically penetrating 1999 study of how Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Mikado,” “Mr. Turner” is truer to the realities of the artist’s life than any other movie ever made. But what really sets it apart from such previous art-themed films as “Lust for Life,” Vincente Minnelli’s excellent 1956 study of Vincent Van Gogh, is that “Mr. Turner” isn’t just about Turner. It’s also about the long-lost world in which he lived, England in the first half of the 19th century, and part of what makes it a great film is the thickly layered complexity with which it illustrates that world.

The special genius of film is that it is a realistic, quasi-documentary pictorial medium. Hence it lends itself to the construction of cinematic “time machines” like “Mr. Turner” and “Topsy-Turvy,” in which layer upon layer of painstakingly realized visual details create an uncanny impression of historical reality. No stage production can summon up that kind of you-are-there illusion…

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Read the whole thing here.

The theatrical trailer for Mr. Turner:

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River