Archives for June 2015

“My quarrel with propaganda in the theatre is that it’s such damned unconvincing propaganda—whereas, if you will restrain the propaganda purpose to the selection of the life to be portrayed and then let that lie live itself without comment, it does your trick. I advise this in the name of flesh & blood propaganda!”

Eugene O’Neill, letter to Michael Gold (July 2, 1926)

My very good friend Ricky Riccardi, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Louis Armstrong and a colleague as amiable and forthcoming as Satchmo himself, has just written a lengthy and valuable blog post about Satchmo at the Waldorf in which he takes issue with several aspects of my play, which he saw in New York last year. Ricky, as he readily acknowledges, is a scholar, not a drama critic, and it goes without saying (or should!) that scholars and playwrights have different priorities. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, his problems with Satchmo arise from its deviations from the factual record, not its effectiveness as a work of art.

I, too, have worn the scholar’s cap, which is what made it possible for me to write Satchmo in the first place. Nevertheless, I don’t claim that it is anything other than (as the title page says) “a work of fiction, freely based on fact.” For this reason, I see no need to respond in detail to Ricky’s posting. If you want to know which parts of Satchmo are true and which are made up, all you have to do is consult Pops, my 2009 biography of Armstrong. If it’s in the play but not in the book, it didn’t happen.

Ricky and I do, however, interpret certain crucial matters of fact in sharply different ways. The one that is most relevant in this connection is that he believes Armstrong to have remained staunchly loyal to Joe Glaser, his manager, to the very end of his life. Accordingly, he completely discounts the contradictory testimony of George Wein, who specifically states in Myself Among Others, his autobiography, that Armstrong claimed in 1970, a year before his death, that he believed himself to have been betrayed by Glaser. (According to Wein, Armstrong made this claim in front of Wein and two other witnesses.) That alleged betrayal lies at the heart of Satchmo at the Waldorf. Indeed, it is the hinge on which the whole plot pivots.

After seeing Satchmo off Broadway, Wein wrote to tell me that he thought my portrayal of the Armstrong-Glaser relationship, which is based in part on Myself Among Others, was accurate. Many other people who knew both Armstrong and Glaser have told me the same thing. For what it’s worth, I believe that Ricky is absolutely wrong to dismiss Wein’s first-person account, which I find wholly believable, and that the many contemporary public statements by Armstrong that he cites in evidence against it are just that—statements made for public consumption that ought not to be taken at face value.

Ricky also contends that Miles Davis took a more benign view of Armstrong’s old-fashioned stage manner than the fictional Davis portrayed in Satchmo at the Waldorf. Up to a point, I agree. The “Miles Davis” of Satchmo unequivocally calls Armstrong an Uncle Tom. The real Davis, by contrast, said different things about Armstrong at different times in his life, some of which closely track what he says in the play and some of which do not. My “Miles Davis,” however, is a deliberately simplified version of the real Davis, a Greek-chorus character whose dramatic function is to embody the hostile attitudes toward Armstrong’s public persona that were widely held by blacks of a younger generation—including, at times, Miles himself.

Finally, Ricky says that many people have told him that they came away from Satchmo at the Waldorf supposing that Louis Armstrong died broke and had to work until he died in order to pay his bills. Neither supposition is true, and I hasten to point out that the text of Satchmo at the Waldorf makes no such claim. To the contrary: “It ain’t about the money, got me plenty of that,” Armstrong says in the play. If you didn’t hear that line, you weren’t listening. For the record, I’ve talked to dozens of people who’ve seen Satchmo since it was first produced in 2011, and none of them has ever asked me if Armstrong was penniless when he died.

I have no doubt that Ricky would have preferred for me to portray Armstrong’s relationships with Davis and Glaser in a less fraught manner, both in Satchmo and in Pops. I, on the other hand, believe that Armstrong’s personality was darker and more complicated than the fundamentally optimistic (though in no way Pollyannish) Armstrong of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, Ricky’s indispensable 2011 monograph. But our two books are in no way mutually contradictory: they are, rather, complementary.

As for Satchmo at the Waldorf, it is, as I’ve said all along, a work of fiction, albeit one that I believe to be essentially accurate in its overall portrayal of the personality and attitudes of Louis Armstrong. Nevertheless, its “accuracy” is not that of a primary-source biography like Pops. Satchmo is a drama, with all the compression, simplification, transposition, and alteration implied by that word. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Abe Lincoln in Illinois or A Man for All Seasons, you’ll know exactly what I was trying to do. (Amadeus, which is far more fictional than Satchmo, is another matter altogether, though I do believe it to be a great work of theatrical art.)

If, on the other hand, you prefer to stick exclusively to the plain, unadorned facts…well, you know where to find them!

UPDATE: A musician friend who read this posting responded by quoting Picasso:

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.

To which another reader replied:

Please don’t write any more plays about jazz musicians. Just because the play is fiction doesn’t mean that you can make up lies, or base your plays upon things that you know are lies. Naïve theatregoers will walk away thinking that you know what you’re doing.

I wonder whether he actually saw the play. Somehow I doubt it.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I write about a Chicago-area revival of Doubt and the Broadway premiere of An Act of God. Here’s an excerpt.

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What does a thriving drama company do when its old theater has been torn down and its new theater is still under construction? Writers Theatre, which is building a two-auditorium complex that’s scheduled to open early next year, has been putting on shows at various locations in Glencoe, the Chicago suburb that is its home. The latest of these, a revival of “Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s powerful and provocative 2004 play about a Roman Catholic priest who may or may not be a child molester, is a site-specific production that is being performed not in a conventional theater but on a temporary stage erected in the library of Glencoe Union Church. This is a brilliant conceit, all the more so for its improvised nature, and William Brown’s staging is as starkly believable as its you-are-there setting. I saw the original New York production of “Doubt” three times, once in a small off-Broadway house and twice after it moved to Broadway. It was thrilling, but this one is better.

The secret of the success of Mr. Brown’s version is the precisely gauged scale of the acting. Brían F. O’Byrne and Cherry Jones, who created the roles of Father Flynn, the charismatic priest, and Sister Aloysius, the hard-boiled nun who is resolved to bring him down, gave larger-than-life performances that were magnetic but—in the best possible sense of the word—the least little bit stagy. Steve Haggard and Karen Janes Woditsch, by contrast, give the impression of having wandered into the theater from the sanctuary downstairs: Mr. Haggard is not flashy (and therefore suspicious) but disarmingly affable, while Ms. Woditsch plays the implacable Sister Aloysius without the slightest trace of theatricality….

Mr. Shanley’s play is, if anything, more relevant now than it was 11 years ago. But its relevance is beside the point, for “Doubt” is not a mere tract for the times but a well-wrought play of the highest possible quality…

So you want to understand what’s become of Broadway? Consider the case of “An Act of God.” Directed by Joe Mantello, it’s based on “The Last Testament: A Memoir by God,” the best-selling 2011 book by David Javerbaum, the former head writer of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” which in turn was based on @TheTweetOfGod, a snarky Twitter account with two million followers in which the Deity Himself, as channeled by Mr. Javerbaum, purports to hold forth on current events. That so microscopically slight a pseudo-play has made it to Broadway can in yet another turn be explained by the money-minting presence of Jim Parsons, star of “The Big Bang Theory,” who plays God. Here, as they say, endeth the lesson.

You’ll be somewhat more likely to laugh at God’s relentlessly unfunny jokes (“Yes, the Bible is 100% accurate—especially when thrown at close range”) if you already agree with everything that Mr. Javerbaum and/or his ex-boss think about everything. Otherwise, you’ll find them as predictable as a Quarter Pounder…

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To read my review of Doubt, go here.

To read my review of An Act of God, go here.

An interview with William Brown, the director of Writers Theatre’s revival of Doubt:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I pay tribute to the underappreciated Roy Webb. Here’s an excerpt.

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Here’s a pop quiz for film fanatics: What do these 10 movies have in common? No cute answers, please:

• “Abe Lincoln in Illinois”
• “Back to Bataan”
• “Blood on the Moon”
• “I Remember Mama”
• “Kitty Foyle”
• “The Leopard Man”
• “Love Affair”
• “Marty”
• “My Favorite Wife”
• “The Spiral Staircase”

Don’t blush if you came up blank—this one’s for specialists only. All 10 films were scored by Roy Webb, who served as RKO’s chief staff composer from 1936 to 1955. A kindly, soft-spoken craftsman who died in 1982 at the age of 94, Webb is the most obscure of the major film-music composers. He never won an Oscar (though he was nominated seven times) and published only one article about his work. Today he is mainly remembered for “Notorious,” his sole collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. Only two CDs of his scores have been released, and he mostly figures in passing, if at all, in published histories of film music. Yet Webb was the peer of such better-known contemporaries as Alfred Newman, Max Steiner and Dmitri Tiomkin, and there is no good reason why his name and work aren’t far more familiar.

Among connoisseurs, Webb is best known for scoring Val Lewton’s horror films and, a few years later, virtually every top-flight film noir released by RKO in the ‘40s and ‘50s….

At first Webb cranked out whatever RKO needed. Then he found his voice in Lewton’s “Cat People” (1942) and “I Walked With a Zombie” (1943). In these low-budget, high-impact shockers, incomparably directed by Jacques Tourneur, nothing is shown and everything is suggested. As a result, they necessarily rely on music for much of their dramatic effect, and Webb obliged by ratcheting up the suspense with biting dissonances, leavened with a yearning tenderness…

But Webb was at his best in film noir, above all in “Out of the Past,” Tourneur’s 1947 masterpiece, in which all of his stylistic traits were fused into a tightly unified score. Robert Mitchum plays a small-town gas-station owner whose violent past catches up with him at last and sweeps him into a deadly whirlpool of big-city turmoil. Unlike less perceptive composers, Webb sensed that film noir is rooted in a bruised, disillusioned romanticism, and so the main-title theme of “Out of the Past,” which is woven throughout the film (Mitchum even whistles it), is not a piece of pounding musical excitement but a warmly outdoorsy theme whose unexpected changes of key hint at trouble ahead….

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Read the whole thing here.

Six excerpts from Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past that illustrate Roy Webb’s use and development of the film’s main-title theme, which is heard both as underscoring and as source music:

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The melody that Roy Webb uses throughout “Out Of The Past” is “The First Time I Saw You,” a song that was written by Nathaniel Shilkret and Allie Wrubel and first performed by Frances Farmer in an earlier RKO movie, The Toast Of New York, in 1937.

How about that? Believe it or not, I actually know who Nat Shilkret was—among many other things, he conducted the first and still-unrivaled recording of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris—but I’ve never heard the song or seen the earlier film.

This is just to remind you that the latest episode of Theater Talk, in which Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel discuss the Broadway season just past with Ben Brantley, Peter Marks, John Simon, and yours truly, airs on CUNY-TV this Sunday at seven p.m. EDT. Yes, we had our usual fair share of disagreements (as well as a not-inconsiderable amount of consensus). Yes, John said several characteristically snarky things. No, we didn’t get into any fistfights.

I’ll be posting video of the episode as soon as it’s available on YouTube. Watch this space next week.

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

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:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, most 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)
• On the Twentieth Century (musical, G/PG-13, virtually all performances sold out, closes July 19, contains very mild sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Visit (serious musical, PG-13, far too dark and disturbing for children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BOSTON:
• Light Up the Sky (comedy, G, not suitable for small children, closes June 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Sense and Sensibility (musical, G, closes June 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• The Blood Quilt (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Permission (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

“One of my heroes is the writer William Maxwell, also no longer around in his earthly shape. Late in his life, he began taking piano lessons and working his way through some simple classical pieces. I think this gave him great pleasure but was also frustrating—in the way making music is even more difficult for those who have spent their lives appreciating the superb performances of others. In his final year, a dear friend said to him, ‘Bill, in the life to come you will be able to play the piano with ease, won’t you?’ And he replied, ‘In the next life I will not be making music. I will be music.’”

Michael Steinman, “Marty Napoleon (1921-2015)” (Jazz Lives, April 29, 2015)