Archives for April 24, 2015

In the last of three season-wrapping drama columns that appeared in The Wall Street Journal this week, I review the Broadway transfers of The Visit and Airline Highway Here’s an excerpt.

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Fourteen years after it was set to open on Broadway, “The Visit,” the final John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, has gotten there at last, extensively reworked along the way by Mr. Kander, the composer, and Terrence McNally, who wrote the book. (Ebb, who wrote the lyrics, died in 2004.) This production, previously seen last summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, was worth the wait. Directed by John Doyle, the master of miniaturized musicals, and starring Chita Rivera, who made her Broadway debut 62 years ago and still has what it takes, “The Visit” is a cynical tragicomedy whose score is as gorgeous as its heart is hard. If that’s your cup of arsenic, you’ve come to the right apothecary.

Based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play, “The Visit” is the story of Claire (Ms. Rivera), a rich old crone who pays a long-delayed visit to Brachen, her decaying home town, whose impoverished citizens need help and trust she’ll give it to them. And so she will—but only if they’ll be so kind as to first do her the favor of murdering Anton (Roger Rees), a well-liked shopkeeper who jilted her long ago and on whom she now means to have her revenge….

Mr. Kander’s soaring, waltz-scented love songs are harmonized in an off-center manner subtly suggestive of dirty work at the crossroads. (Imagine a carton of cream that’s a day away from curdling and you’ll get the idea.) As for Ms. Rivera, who sounds like a cross between Hermione Gingold and Rex Harrison and is made up to resemble a walking mummy, she’s all too terrifyingly believable as Claire. When she assures Anton that “I’ve waited a lifetime for this moment,” you’ll feel your insides shriveling.

Mr. Rees, by contrast, is rather too ingratiating, and Mr. McNally’s jokey book softens the impact of the play. In addition, the Broadway version of “The Visit” has been cut down to 90 minutes, doubtless to render Dürrenmatt’s harsh parable even more accessible to Broadway audiences. As a result, the show is now too fast on its feet. (The good folk of Brachen shouldn’t take Claire’s bait that quickly.) But “The Visit” is horrifically potent in every other way…

It’s so uncommon for up-and-coming playwrights to make it to Broadway nowadays that Lisa D’Amour’s “Airline Highway” is of interest for that reason alone. After its premiere last year by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, it has transferred to Broadway mostly intact, and Joe Mantello’s production, in which set designer Scott Pask has put a good-sized chunk of a seedy New Orleans motel onstage, is a young author’s dream.

I wish the play were as good, but it’s a wholly derivative piece of work that has been knocked together from refurbished spare theatrical parts. Ms. D’Amour might just as well have called it “The Hot L New Orleans, or, An Iceman Named Saroyan.” The formula is just that: We get to know a gaggle of beautiful losers who’ve ended up at the Humming Bird Motel, there to face their variously hopeless fates in the manner of—yes, you guessed it—a family. All are straight out of Central Casting…

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To read my complete review of The Visit, go here.

To read my complete review of Airline Highway, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Henry Folger, who amassed the collection that became the Folger Shakespeare Library, and about art collectors in general. Might they perhaps all be slightly loony? Here’s an excerpt.

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When I started buying fine-art prints, a critic told me, “You won’t be a real art collector until you own more pieces than you have room to hang.” Sure enough, there comes a point in the lives of many collectors when the urge to accumulate overwhelms the passion to appreciate. That’s what happened to Henry Folger, the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, whose passion for Shakespeare is chronicled in Andrea Mays’ “The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio,” which will be published in May by Simon & Schuster.

Folger was a self-made millionaire who in his youth became fascinated by Shakespeare’s plays. Working in tandem with his wife Emily, he started collecting early editions of Shakespeare’s writings in 1889, when he was still a salaried executive who didn’t make enough money to fling it around. But he spent lavishly anyway, and by the time he died in 1930, the Folgers had assembled a huge collection that included 79 copies of the “First Folio,” the earliest published edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and were building a museum to house it in Washington, D.C.

Even after Henry became rich, the Folgers lived simply in a rented Brooklyn house. Instead of trying to buy their way into society, they sank their money into the collection and, later, the building where it can now be viewed by the public. As a result, Ms. Mays writes, they were never able to fully appreciate their holdings: “Once Henry and Emily had stuffed the rooms and closets of their modest home full of Shakespeariana, they had to banish the bulk of their treasures to warehouses, perhaps never to be seen by them again.”

That’s a symptom of Collector’s Mania, one of the most mysterious diseases known to man. Its best-known victim was Charles Foster Kane, the fictional anti-hero of “Citizen Kane,” who amassed what the film describes as “a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised, enough for 10 museums.” By the end of his life, Kane was buying sculptures without bothering to take them out of their shipping crates. Many real-life gilded-age American millionaires who collected art in bulk, like William Randolph Hearst (Kane’s model) and J.P. Morgan, did so in the same obsessive and puzzling way….

Absent the ulterior motives of personal glory or pecuniary profit, why would anyone who claims to love art buy expensive works of art, then put them in storage? What kind of love is that? The only good reason I can think of to buy a sculpture is to be able to look at it every day….

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Read the whole thing here.

“The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.”

William Hazlitt, “On Cant and Hypocrisy”