Archives for July 2015

From 2005:

Sometimes I find myself hungering for solitude, and there are occasions when I’m almost painfully grateful to spend a night with my prints, my CDs, my iBook, and my trusty TV, watching What’s My Line?, keeping my own counsel and staying up as late as I like. I’ve recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I even like vacationing alone. At the same time, I’m no hermit, and like most singletons, I find there are other times when being alone is no fun at all. One is when you finish watching a really good movie and, instead of chatting about it over a drink with a friend, retire to an empty hotel room in a city far from home….

Read the whole thing here.

“There was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

On Friday I drove from Connecticut to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, home of the Shaw Festival, about which I’ll be writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. I made the seven-hour trip by myself, since Mrs. T was worn out from our recent travels and so didn’t feel up to accompanying me. The two of us had been more or less inseparable for the past few weeks, and when we travel in tandem, we tend to chatter nonstop about everything under the sun. Suspecting that I might find the day-long drive more than a little bit tedious in her absence, I took care to pack a more than usually enticing selection of compact discs for purposes of diversion en route.

At first I was content to watch the world go by without benefit of soundtrack, but by the time I reached the outskirts of Albany, I was sorely in need of distraction. Stone-hard country music sounded just right to me, so I pulled out a two-disc anthology
of recordings by the Louvin Brothers, fired up the CD player, slipped Handpicked Songs 1955-1962 into the slot, and found myself listening to a gospel song written in 1871 that reminded me forcibly of a half-forgotten aspect of my lost youth.

I last had occasion to write about the Louvin Brothers in a 2012 Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, apropos of the publication of Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, a memoir by Charlie Louvin that is named after their most celebrated album:

Like many sibling acts, they were a match made in hell, so much so that Ira Louvin’s violent, alcohol-fueled temper finally led Charlie, his younger brother, to break up the duo in 1963, two years before Ira died in a car crash. But you’d never have guessed it from hearing them sing together, for their high, hard-bitten voices wound round one another in harmonies so closely woven that you couldn’t always tell which brother was singing what part….

Flannery O’Connor observed in 1960 that “while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” Ira Louvin, who could never reconcile his deep-seated religious convictions with his fleshly urges, would have known exactly what she was talking about. To listen to a Louvin Brothers song like “Are You Afraid to Die” is to be left in no doubt whatsoever that Ira was at least as Christ-haunted as any of O’Connor’s fictional characters. According to Charlie, Ira believed that he had been called by God to preach the gospel, but was incapable of fulfilling his destiny: “It haunted him that he didn’t do what he was put here on this earth to do.”

You can hear exactly what Charlie Louvin was talking about in their performance of Almost Persuaded, whose doleful lyrics leave the listener in no possible doubt that the unnamed sinner at whom they are aimed is in grave and imminent danger of spending eternity in the hands of an extremely angry God:

“Almost persuaded,” harvest is past!
“Almost persuaded,” doom comes at last;
“Almost” cannot avail;
“Almost” is but to fail!
Sad, sad that bitter wail—
“Almost—but lost!”

Needless to say, the Louvin Brothers sing it exquisitely well—they sang everything exquisitely well—and you don’t have to believe in anything more than the ineffable beauty of a gleaming high note to relish their performance. But it so happens that I was raised a Southern Baptist, and as I listened to “Almost Persuaded,” I was put irresistibly in mind of the Sunday-morning “altar calls” in the Baptist churches of Smalltown, U.S.A., during which the preacher invited “unsaved” members of the congregation to come down the aisle and get right with God as their fellow worshippers waited patiently with heads bowed. These often-protracted exhortations were invariably accompanied by a slower-than-slow hymn, and I can’t imagine why “Almost Persuaded” never made the cut at my church, it being a quintessential example of the altar-call genre at its most ominously imploring.

Having whiled away the better part of a nostalgic afternoon listening to Charlie and Ira as I motored west through rural New York, I decided that a change of key was in order, so I put on the original-cast album of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, a musical whose songs portray sex and its discontents with a knowing worldliness that has nothing whatsoever in common with “Almost Persuaded” save for the fact that they, too, are in three-quarter time.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I recently saw and reviewed an excellent regional revival of Sondheim’s Company. It set me to thinking about how Jonathan Tunick’s up-to-the-minute 1970 orchestrations for that hugely influential show have long since acquired a near-quaint patina (they now sound very much like the kind of pit-band pop-rock you might have heard on a TV variety show of the period) that is decidedly at odds with its still-fresh subject matter.

For this reason, I found myself paying closer-than-usual attention to the completely different way in which Tunick scored A Little Night Music three years later. The string-laden orchestrations are, to be sure, gorgeous and elegant, but with small-scale Sondheim productions being all the rage these days, a brainwave occurred to me: why doesn’t somebody arrange the orchestral parts to A Little Night Music for piano duet, in the manner of the Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer to which Sondheim was surely paying affectionate tribute when he included in the cast a quintet of what he called “Lieder Singers”? Not only would such an accompaniment be musically appropriate to the highest degree, but it would be wonderfully well suited to the needs of any company that longs to present an intimate staging of A Little Night Music in a very small theater.

As I listened, I spent the next forty-five minutes or so mentally rescoring the first nine numbers from A Little Night Music for piano, four hands, and by the time “A Weekend in the Country” had run its course, I was, much to my surprise, within spitting distance of Buffalo. Never has the drive from Connecticut to the Canadian border passed so quickly or pleasingly.

If you’ve ever wondered what kinds of things I think about when I’m by myself…well, that’s a pretty good example.

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From the BBC Proms 2010 “Sondheim at 80” concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Maria Friedman, Caroline O’Connor, Julian Ovenden, and Jenna Russell sing “A Weekend in the Country,” the first-act finale of A Little Night Music, accompanied by David Charles Abell and the BBC Concert Orchestra. The orchestration is by Jonathan Tunick:

Two excerpts from George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer, choreographed in 1960 to Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer and Neues Liebeslieder Walzer, Opp. 52 and 65. This performance, originally telecast by the CBC on L’Heure du Concert in 1961, is danced by Jillana, Conrad Ludlow, and the other members of the original New York City Ballet cast:

The Louvin Brothers sing “Hoping That You’re Hoping” on TV in 1956:

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

“When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win.”

Geoff Dyer, “Over and Out”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a New Hampshire revival of A Garden Fête, one of the eight plays from Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges cycle, and the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Douglas Carter Beane’s Shows for Days, which stars Patti LuPone. Here’s an excerpt.

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Alan Ayckbourn’s “Intimate Exchanges,” first performed in 1983, consists of eight intertwined full-evening plays in which two actors portray a total of ten characters. The plays all start in the same way, then shear off in different directions—and each one is equipped with its own pair of alternate endings. While the complete cycle can only be presented in a festival setting, all of the plays are free-standing and can also be produced independently, and the Peterborough Players, who mounted a first-class revival of Mr. Ayckbourn’s “Absurd Person Singular” in 2013, are now doing “A Garden Fête,” inviting the members of the audience to vote on which ending will be performed.

I had the good fortune to see Mr. Ayckbourn’s own stagings of the eight “Intimate Exchanges” plays performed off Broadway in 2008 by two members of his own Stephen Joseph Theatre, Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst. Nobody stages Mr. Ayckbourn’s work better than the playwright himself, but Gus Kaikkonen, Peterborough’s artistic director, comes very close, for he understands that “A Garden Fête,” like its seven companion pieces, is a dead-serious farce whose unfailingly uproarious horseplay cloaks a piercing vision of the limitations of human love. As always with Mr. Ayckbourn, the results are really, really funny, but the best jokes (if you want to call them that) are all double-edged and shiv-sharp, especially the ones that have to do with marriage…

Many people who wind up devoting their lives to theater get their start in one of the countless small-town amateur troupes known as “community theaters.” Some are as absurdly awful as the one that is satirized on screen in “Waiting for Guffman,” while others are near-professional in quality. Most probably fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Douglas Carter Beane, who spent his teenage years acting with such a group, has now written a lightweight but charming autobiographical comedy—call it a memory farce—about what it’s like to do Shaw on a shoestring. While “Shows for Days” is no masterpiece, it’s unfailingly funny and disarmingly sweet, and if you’ve ever had anything to do with amateur theater, it will fill you with memories of the way you were once upon a time….

“Shows for Days” has a loosely knit, Kleenex-thin plot that makes an unconvincing swerve into melodrama after intermission. But the six actors, Ms. LuPone above all, squeeze every drop of comic juice from their campy zingers…

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To read my review of A Garden Fête, go here.

To read my review of Shows for Days, go here.

And what color should he be? That’s the subject, more or less, of my “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

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In this country, Steven Berkoff is mostly known (if at all) as the villain in “Beverly Hills Cop.” In his native England, by contrast, he is known as an avant-garde theater artist who likes to say outrageous things. It was in the latter capacity that he recently went after a London drama critic, Paul Taylor of the Independent, who was covering the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of “Othello,” in which the title role, as is now the invariable custom, was played by a black actor, Hugh Quarshie. “The days when it was thought acceptable for a white actor to black up as Othello are well behind us,” Mr. Taylor wrote. Mr. Berkoff responded angrily on his Facebook page by recalling Laurence Olivier’s performance in “Othello”: “I was so lucky I was able to witness this great event before the fiends of political correctness in all their self-righteousness had struck a no-go-zone for white actors on that particular role.”

Anyone who’s seen Olivier’s Othello, which was filmed in 1965, knows that it was, indeed, a supremely great event. But anyone who follows the theater scene knows that such an event will never happen again, at least not in my lifetime. Today we take it for granted that Othello, one of the only two major Shakespearean characters who is specifically described by the playwright as black, should be played by a black actor. It’s considered inappropriate, even racist, for a white actor to put on blackface, as Olivier did 50 years ago, to play Othello.

And should that be so? Well…it’s complicated.

Nowadays virtually all theater companies are committed, some more zealously than others, to what’s known as “non-traditional casting,” which is very often employed without regard for strict dramatic or visual logic….

So why not a white Othello? Wouldn’t that qualify as non-traditional these days? The answer is obvious: The door of non-traditional casting swings one way. It is normally intended to benefit minorities, not whites, who have no history of being excluded from stage roles because of their skin color. To be sure, I can easily imagine an “Othello” in which all of the characters but Othello were black, and I expect that would pass political muster. Nothing less, however, would be deemed acceptable today…

Is that logical? I suppose not. But America, as the multifarious complexities of the Rachel Dolezal imbroglio remind us, has never been very logical when it comes to matters of race….

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Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from the 1965 film of Othello, directed by Stuart Burge, with Laurence Olivier in the title role and Maggie Smith as Desdemona. The film is closely based on John Dexter’s 1964 National Theatre staging of the play:

An excerpt from Abe Lincoln in Illinois, starring Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln. The film, released in 1940, was directed by John Cromwell and adapted by Robert E. Sherwood from his original stage play, which opened on Broadway in 1938 and ran for 472 performances. This scene is a fictionalized portrayal of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Stephen Douglas is played by Gene Lockhart:

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