Archives for June 2015

I got an e-mail yesterday afternoon from Patti Wolff, interim artistic director of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, informing me that the entire run of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, is now sold out. It’s a hit.

Not to be obvious, but this couldn’t possibly have happened without the amazing work of John Douglas Thompson and Gordon Edelstein, the star and director, and the production team that designed Satchmo in 2012, moved it off Broadway last year, and now have brought it to California for its West Coast premiere. Plays don’t play themselves—especially not this well.. Heartfelt thanks, too, to Patti and her wonder-working colleagues for believing in our show and getting it up and running at the Wallis. They’re all made of gold.

What next for Satchmo? A new production, directed by Charles Newell, begins performances at Chicago’s Court Theatre on January 7. Meanwhile, the staging now playing at the Wallis will move to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater on January 13. Two more runs of Satchmo, in Colorado Springs and West Palm Beach, will follow in due course, with further productions set for 2016-17.

After that? Well, we’ll see. But I’m more than happy just as is.

I confessed the other day to being “the kind of guy who loves Stephen Sondheim and John Wayne.” (So, incidentally, is David Thomson.)

Apropos of this daring admission, a reader writes:

I thought you might be interested in this little story. Years ago here in Boston, I knew the then-managers of the Lyric Stage (long since departed), who had many stories about the various guest stars who appeared in Lyric productions. Among them was Nehemiah Persoff, who had a John Wayne story. Though Persoff was very far from Wayne on the political spectrum, he still liked working with him since he was such a skilled professional, and Wayne returned the compliment, once inviting Persoff to dinner. Wayne was then carrying a big briefcase and at the table he started to rummage through it looking for something and out came, of all things, a volume of Noël Coward plays! Persoff was amazed. Wayne said he greatly admired Coward and had always wanted to be in a Coward film—but “the sons-o-bitches wouldn’t let me.”

This surprises me a little, but not much. Not only was Wayne very well read, but he had, as all of his fans know, a flair for comedy. Indeed, two of his middle-period films, A Lady Takes a Chance and Without Reservations, are out-and-out romcoms, while Rio Bravo (like North by Northwest) is best understood as a comedy sprinkled with intermittent bursts of gunplay.

Trying to figure out which Coward role would best have suited Wayne is…well, rather more of a stretch. I can’t exactly see the Duke as Charles Condomine or Garry Essendine! But it sure would have been fun to watch him try—and I bet he would have had just as much fun trying.

* * *

The trailer for the 1953 re-release of Without Reservations, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Claudette Colbert and John Wayne:

Paul Paray leads L’Orchestre National de l’ORTF in an undated performance of the orchestral version of Emmanuel Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque:

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

“Listen, Delly, I know it doesn’t make much sense when you’re sixteen. Don’t worry. When you get to be forty, it isn’t any better.”

Alan Sharp, screenplay for Night Moves

Having recently acquired a very handsome lithograph by Romare Bearden, Mrs. T and I weren’t planning to buy any more art any time soon. Sometimes, though, you can’t say no, and when Milton Avery’s Gray Sea came up for auction at a Detroit house, it struck me that his work might be sufficiently unfamiliar to local bidders to attract much attention. Hence I decided to place a ridiculously low bid (three figures, not high) and see what happened. What happened was that we are now the surprised but happy owners of an excellent copy of the last and best of Avery’s eight lithographs.

Published in 1963, two years before his death, in an edition of 118 copies, “Gray Sea” is a choice example of Avery’s late, all-but-abstract style. Like so many of his later paintings, it’s a marine landscape, colored with extreme subtlety, in which Avery took full advantage of the enforced simplicity of the medium (color transfer lithography on zinc). Just as he did in such better-known paintings of the same period as Black Sea and Sea Grasses and Blue Sea, Avery pared what he saw in his mind’s eye down to its absolute essentials. The results are breathtaking in their economy of means.

Indisputably important though he is, Avery has never been fashionable, least of all now. The Museum of Modern Art, which owns “Sea Grasses and Blue Sea,” hasn’t hung it for years. (So far as I know, its copy of “Gray Sea” has never been exhibited.) But Mrs. T and I both love his work passionately, so much so that we already own one of his drypoints, March at a Table. We’ll be proud to hang “Gray Sea” as a companion piece to that exquisite little portrait of the artist’s daughter.

From 2005:

Very few people who don’t write for a living understand that writing is work, much less that a writer who is sitting in a chair, reading a book or staring absently into the distance, may be as “busy” as one who is clicking away at his computer. My mother, for one, has never quite grasped this basic fact of the writer’s life, which is why I find it hard to get any work done when visiting Smalltown, U.S.A. I once yelled at her for coming into my bedroom three times in a row and attempting to strike up a conversation while I was doing my best to polish off a column…

Read the whole thing here.

“Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

When I was a youngster, I played in my high school’s band and orchestra, sang in two different choirs, took violin and piano lessons after school, acted in plays and musicals, went to classical concerts and movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, checked out as many books as I could haul home from the public library every week, and got perfect grades every quarter. Had there been a dance company anywhere near Smalltown, U.S.A., I’m sure I would have faithfully attended its performances as well.

Since I also wore thick glasses and was worse than hopeless at team sports, this was more than enough to brand me as different—way different—in the eyes of my fellow students. Most of them were perfectly nice about it, but a few accused me of being a “mama’s boy” and, worse yet, a “sissy.” To the first accusation I had no plausible defense, that being exactly what I was, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would call me a sissy, since I wasn’t girlish, just…different.

My best friend wasn’t a sissy, either, but he was what I would learn later on to call “campy,” enough so that I thought of him long after the fact when I saw Clueless, in which one of the characters is described by an acquaintance as “a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.” By then I understood what that string of signifiers signified, and it had been no surprise to me when I learned that my friend had died of AIDS, any more than it had surprised me to hear a few years earlier that he was running an antique shop in New England. The last time I’d seen him, he’d boasted to me of being pals with Roslyn Kind. To my credit, I didn’t laugh in his face, though I wasn’t yet fully attuned to the pathos of claiming such a friendship as a distinction.

Needless to say, I didn’t know much about homosexuality in high school. I was attracted to women, not men, so I basically took it for granted that I wasn’t One of Those. On the other hand, I seemed to like all the other things that gay men liked—and that scarcely any of my other male classmates liked, so far as I could tell—which led me to wonder for a brief time whether my cultural tastes might possibly be indicative of some deeper-seated departure from the small-town norm. I soon figured out that my father was also wondering the same thing about me, though I eventually put his doubts to rest by becoming a jazz musician, which he took to be definitive proof of my normality. (I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to read what I wrote about Billy Strayhorn in Duke!)

As for my own short-lived concerns, they’d long since been dispelled by unambiguous evidence of a point of view summed up by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’ Girl, 20:

What about turning queer? you say to yourself. Plenty of facilities, these days highly respectable, pleasant companions, comparatively inexpensive. And a prick is a splendid thing, and a splendid idea as well. It strikes you. The trouble is that in every case it’s got a man on the end of it. Which I’m afraid puts paid to it as far as I’m concerned.

No doubt it says something significant about me that I’ve preferred the company of women, straight and gay alike, for as long as I can remember, both as romantic partners and as everyday companions. Be that as it may, I’ve never been able to shake off the strong sense of isolating strangeness that I acquired right around the time I discovered that I was the only kid on my block who could do an even halfway passable imitation of Noël Coward introducing Marlene Dietrich at the Café de Paris in 1954.

Complicating matters still further is the comically self-evident fact that I’m not even slightly campy and never have been. When I told Mark Morris that Paul Moravec and I were turning The Letter into an opera, he let out one of the loudest hoots I’ve ever heard. “Two straight guys writing a Bette Davis opera?” he brayed. “And you’re one of them? That is too weird.” And while another acquaintance assured me around the same time that I have a “gay sensibility,” the scatter plot of my taste isn’t nearly tight enough to make such a claim plausible. What kind of guy loves Stephen Sondheim and John Wayne?

Nevertheless, that’s the kind of guy I’m, a straight-as-a-stick small-town boy who grew up to become a big-city drama critic, a profession whose best-known fictional representatives, Addison DeWitt and Waldo Lydecker, aren’t exactly butch—though both of them at least purported to be straight, convincingly in one case, less so in the other. And what of it? I’ve lived long enough to learn that human beings are vastly more complicated than I ever suspected in my youth, in ways not limited to their sexual preferences.

In the end, the thing that matters most is that I’ve grown used to myself. Some people never do, and spend their whole lives trying to stuff themselves into pigeonholes that were never meant to accommodate them. I was lucky: I figured out fairly early that I didn’t have to do that, that it was all right simply to be whoever I was. It still is.