Archives for June 2015

“Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important?

• If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.

• You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.

• Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.

Having attained an age when I find it increasingly difficult to retrieve names with the effortless ease of my youth, I’m fascinated by the persistence, vividness, and exactitude of my earliest memories, many of which have to do either with music or with things I saw on television as a boy.

Here’s a double-barreled example. On September 21, 1963, my family watched the chaotic debut episode of The Jerry Lewis Show, a two-hour-long live prime-time talk-and-variety show for whose forty-week season Lewis was reportedly paid a cool $8 million—at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a TV performer. The series, a legendary fiasco, was canceled after thirteen weeks. (You can read all about it here.) So far as I know, the first episode was never rerun, meaning that I only saw it once. Even so, I clearly recall that Lewis sang a song that night called “Think Pink.” Not only did the refrain lodge permanently in my mind, but I remembered that it was in the key of F major.

Such, at any rate, was my memory—and now, thanks to the queer miracle that is YouTube, I’m in a position to check its accuracy. Scroll forward to 12:45 and you can see and hear “Think Pink” for yourself:

You’ll have to take my word for it, but my recollection of the refrain is note-for-note accurate…and sure enough, it’s in F major.

Why on earth would so trivial a ditty have made so deep an impression on me fifty-two years ago? I can only suppose that childhood memory functions in much the same way as the capacity for language acquisition: once heard, never forgotten.

Whatever the reason, it makes me tremble to imagine the unwanted pieces of pop-culture flotsam and jetsam that will clutter my consciousness on my deathbed. I’d like to think that my head will be full of Das Lied von der Erde or the slow movement of the Schubert Cello Quintet as the Distinguished Thing approaches—but it’s probably just as likely, and far more humbling, that my final thoughts will be of “Think Pink.”

Fats Waller sings and plays “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in Stormy Weather, directed by Andrew L. Stone and released in 1943. The band includes Benny Carter on trumpet, Slam Stewart on bass, and Zutty Singleton on drums. Also seen briefly in this scene are Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson:

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

At long last, here’s an online video of Theater Talk’s 2015 Broadway end-of-season critics’ panel, featuring Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, John Simon of the Westchester Guardian, and me. The hosts are Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel. The shows that we discussed on the telecast, which was taped last month, are Skylight, Fun Home, Finding Neverland, On the Twentieth Century, and Something Rotten!:

“My feeling that not just America but the West is finished is based on a conviction that when a civilization becomes obsessed with its deficiencies, it is degenerating.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (Jan. 28, 1971)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two very different plays about the supernatural, the Public Theater’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of The Tempest and a Baltimore revival of Blithe Spirit. Here’s an excerpt.

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To see “The Tempest” acted under a night sky is like hearing “The Messiah” sung in a cathedral. Whatever the flaws of the production, the sheer rightness of the setting usually makes them forgettable, or at least ignorable, and you come away thinking only of the work. That’s how I felt about Michael Greif’s Central Park production of Shakespeare’s sublime dramatic study of the redemptive power of forgiveness. I didn’t agree with all of Mr. Greif’s choices, but I was glad to go along with them, and by evening’s end my cavils felt picayune: Nothing mattered but the truth and beauty of the play itself.

What is best about Mr. Greif’s “Tempest” is its easy legibility—every line registers—and clear-eyed concentration on Shakespeare’s theme. Sam Waterston’s Prospero, for instance, suggests a comical Lear who has lived to profit from his hard-won moral understanding. Querulously, even petulantly angry at having been cast away on a deserted island and determined at first to exact his revenge, he chooses instead to let love have its way with his soul. Suddenly his sorcery turns inward and he becomes a new man, so fully transformed that he even learns to treat Caliban (Louis Cancelmi) not as a monster but as a pitiably wayward son—a masterly directorial touch that is well realized by Messrs. Waterston and Cancelmi. As his 2011 Public Theater “King Lear” revealed, Mr. Waterston cannot rise to the rhetorical occasions of Shakespeare’s verse, but his sincerity does much to make up for this deficit…

Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” that most shapely and cunning of farces, is so well made that it’s impossible to do badly—but hard to do memorably. Witness Michael Blakemore’s 2009 Broadway revival, in which Angela Lansbury’s delightfully dotty Madame Arcati failed to make a sufficiently strong impression because of the uninspired efficiency of the rest of the production. Not so the far superior version now playing at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre. A starless production staged by Vincent M. Lancisi, the company’s artistic director, this “Blithe Spirit” is an all-cylinders romp in which Nancy Robinette plays Coward’s daft medium in a fluttery manner that immediately put me in mind of Elsa Lanchester—high praise indeed. Comparable kudos go to Beth Hylton, the ghost inadvertently summoned by Madame Arcati at a cocktail party, who plays Elvira as a sexy, dangerously willful woman-child. You’ll have no trouble whatsoever supposing that she’d be capable of scheming to bring about her earthly husband’s premature demise.

The Everyman performs in a 250-seat vaudeville theater built in 1911, then gutted and transformed into an up-to-date house whose neoclassical façade conceals a contemporary lobby and auditorium. The company is as impressive as its home…

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To read my review of The Tempest, go here.

To read my review of Blithe Spirit, go here.

A montage of scenes from The Tempest:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss Jonathan Pryce’s charge that Tom Stoppard is a snob—and put it in a wider cultural context. Here’s an excerpt.

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Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on….You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”

This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”

Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.

Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, California. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking” Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches…

I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the National Theatre’s HD simulcast of The Hard Problem: