Archives for September 2015

I was playing records for Mrs. T in our hotel room late last night. She claimed to be more than usually pleased by my eclectic playlist, so I thought I’d share it with you as well:

• Johnny Hodges, “Castle Rock”

• Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

• Mabel Mercer, “The Best Is Yet to Come”

• Pete Steele, “Coal Creek March”

• Brahms Waltzes, Op. 39 (played by Nadia Boulanger and Dinu Lipatti)

• Dave Dudley, “Six Days on the Road”

• The Dominoes, “Sixty Minute Man”

• Dave Frishberg, “Slappin’ the Cakes on Me”

• The Sons of the Pioneers, “Cool Water”

• Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, “Cherry Red”

• James P. Johnson, “Caprice Rag”

• Stan Getz and Chick Corea, “Captain Marvel”

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Up Above My Head”

• Britten Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo: Si come nella penna (performed by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten)

• Charles Trenet, “La Mer”

• Bill Stepp, “Bonaparte’s Retreat”

• John Scofield with Medeski, Martin & Wood, “Boozer”

• Chopin Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 42 (played by Josef Hofmann)

• The Louvin Brothers, “Cash on the Barrelhead”

• Chabrier Villanelle des petits canards (performed by Pierre Bernac and Francis Poulenc)

• Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, “Close to You”

• Robert Johnson, “Come On in My Kitchen”

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie perform “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Please Be Kind,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Everybody Has a Right to Be Wrong,” and “The Gal That Got Away” on The Hollywood Palace, originally telecast on ABC on October 16, 1965. The conductor is Quincy Jones:

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

“You see, when one’s young one doesn’t feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not ‘for good’; one thinks everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.”

Sybille Bedford, A Compass Error

From 2010:

A number of friends have invited me to play the following game that’s been making the rounds in cyberspace:

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it–choose fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. (These aren’t favorite albums, necessarily, just the fifteen that will always stick with you.)

I drew my list up with as little forethought as possible. When I was finished, I realized that in all but a couple of instances, these were the albums that introduced me to the music of the artists who made them….

Read the whole thing here.

“Plot is for those who already know the world; narrative is for those who want to discover it.”

V.S. Naipaul (quoted in David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper)

Mrs. T and I are in Pittsburgh to see a play. Our last visit here took place four years ago, when we flew out to catch a rare revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, then drove back to Connecticut by way of the Jersey Shore. This trip, by contrast, is more tightly focused (we’re flying in and out) and much more static, thus giving us a fair amount of extra time to look around town.

On Saturday we went to the Carnegie Museum of Art, which impressed us in 2011 and lured us back this time with a single-gallery show called CMOA Collects Edward Hopper consisting of the seventeen works by Hopper that are in the museum’s permanent collection. Most are etchings, including handsome impressions of Night Shadows and The Evening Wind, Hopper’s two best-known prints, but we were also much taken with a 1926 watercolor called Roofs, Washington Square that was new to both of us.

We went through the Hopper exhibition twice. In between we spent an hour and a half looking at the rest of the museum. Most of the pieces that we saw weren’t on display in 2011, and most of the ones that we liked best (including the Hoppers) were small. Possibly because I’ve spent my adult life living in apartments, I have a special love for small paintings and prints, in which the essence of an artist’s style can often be seen in highly compressed form. This is especially true of Berthe Morisot’s Young Girl with a Cat (Julie Manet), an 1888 drypoint that I coveted every bit as much as I did the CMA’s gorgeous copy of “Night Shadows.”

Morisot tends to get short shrift in discussions of the French impressionists, no doubt in part because she was a woman but also because of the soft-spoken intimacy of her work. The CMA also owns a spectacular Monet water-lily panel in front of which Mrs. T and I lingered, but we came back to “Young Girl with a Cat” twice, and I felt even more strongly on a second viewing that I could look at it every day. Aside from its sheer elegance of execution, I delighted in the sharp features of the young girl portrayed therein. If there is such a thing as a quintessentially French face, Julie Manet had one, and Morisot, her mother, managed to catch it on the etching plate.

Two other small paintings held my eye on Saturday. One was John Constable’s The Washing Line, which reminded me of Our Girl in Chicago, who first introduced me to Constable long ago. It is, like so many of Constable’s best paintings, a cloud study, and the CMA’s online catalogue describes it concisely and well:

The view depicted here is thought to be from an upper window of Constable’s home at No. 2 Lower Terrace, Hampstead, near London….In this tiny view of the family’s laundry drying in the garden, the sky provides the even illumination typical of an overcast day, and the sun is nowhere in sight.

I became interested in Constable’s sky studies after seeing a 2004 gallery show that billed itself as “the first sky studies show by John Constable in the United States.” The gallery in question is long gone, its owner (whom I liked very much) having turned out to be a big-league art thief. He is presently doing time in a medium-security prison where one of his fellow inmates was a popular rapper. As for my passion for Constable’s cloud paintings, it remains as strong as ever—though not enough to steal one of them!

We also relished Marsden Hartley’s Robin, a painting from the early Forties that is presently hanging next to a pair of larger and more characteristic canvases by Hartley. They’re both show-stoppers, but once again it was the smaller piece that spoke most eloquently to us. When you collect art, you very often find yourself judging it in terms of what you can envision hanging in your home. It happens that Mrs. T and I are the proud owners of one of Hartley’s lithographs, and it isn’t hard to see “Robin” hanging next to our prized copy of “Apples on Table.”

On the other hand, I can’t possibly imagine owning our favorite painting of the day, Whistler’s Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate, a full-length portrait of the celebrated Spanish violinist-composer for which the only possible word is spectacular. You’d have to live somewhere far more imposing than a two-bedroom Upper Manhattan apartment to hang such a painting with the éclat it merits.

In addition to being reviewed by George Bernard Shaw in 1889 and mentioned in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League,” Sarasate wrote himself into the book of life by cutting ten 78 sides in 1904, four years before he died. Accordingly, the CMA has installed a loudspeaker behind “Arrangement in Black” and plays his antique records on an endless loop. I suppose some connoisseurs might find the resulting effect vulgar, but it thrilled Mrs. T and me to the marrow.

It’s been a while since either of us went to a museum, and while that’s not an accurate index of the place of art in our lives—you don’t go to the trouble of acquiring three dozen carefully chosen prints and paintings unless you’re serious about it—we both came away from the CMA determined to spend more time making the rounds. On the other hand, we said the same thing after seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Florida this past February, yet we haven’t gone to any dance performances since then. It seems there’s only so much spare time in a human life, and I find that I want to spend more and more of mine staying at home with Mrs. T. In any case, the fewer things you see, the more they mean to you.

To be sure, I didn’t feel that way back in my boulevardier days. Very likely I shouldn’t have: to everything there is a season. For me the time has come to reap the harvest of decades of looking and listening. Different seasons may follow—or not. But whatever the future has in store for me, I can’t imagine that my once-inexhaustible appetite for the new has abated other than temporarily.

Rimbaud said it:

Enough seen. The vision was encountered under all skies.
Enough had. Noises of cities, in the evening, and in the sunshine, and always.
Enough known. The pauses of life—O Sounds and Visions!
Departure into new affection and new noise!

It will be interesting to find out what new noises still await me as I prepare to cross the sixtieth meridian.

* * *

Pablo de Sarasate plays his “Caprice Basque,” recorded in London in 1904:

“Mighty Manhattan, New York’s Wonder City,” a 1949 Technicolor documentary short written and narrated by James A. FitzPatrick and directed by James H. Smith:

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

“Hatreds are the cinders of affection.”

Sir Walter Raleigh, letter to Sir Robert Cecil (May 10, 1593).

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two regional revivals, a small-scale My Fair Lady in Boston and a storefront staging of The Time of Your Life in Chicago. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

“My Fair Lady,” that most scenically resplendent of golden-age Broadway spectacles, wouldn’t seem at first blush to be all that well suited to the small-scale approach that has lately become the most significant trend in American musical-theater production. But the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, whose compact 234-seat thrust-stage house can’t come anywhere near accommodating a traditional staging of “My Fair Lady,” has dared to perform the show on a unit set with a cast of 16, an orchestra of three and no amplification, and done so to immensely satisfactory effect. I’ve seen some fine “My Fair Ladies” in the past, but I’ve never seen one, not even Amanda Dehnert’s unforgettable school-of-Brecht 2013 Oregon Shakespeare Festival version, that did a better job of conveying the sweet romanticism that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe slipped into George Bernard Shaw’s skewering of the British class system. The results are—as Lerner might have put it—loverly.

The good news starts at the top: Jennifer Ellis is as strong an Eliza Doolittle as I’ve seen anywhere, including on screen. She sings beautifully and acts without exaggeration, leaving it to the score and script to work their magic. Christopher Chew hews to the same pattern as Henry Higgins, making no effort whatsoever to “do” Rex Harrison. He and Ms. Ellis personify the approach that Scott Edmiston, the director, describes in his program note: “We have shifted the focus from spectacle to character.” What you get, in other words, is not so much “My Fair Lady” as Shaw’s “Pygmalion” with songs—and what songs!

Small-scale stagings demand smart set designers, and Janie E. Howland fills the bill with a double-decker Art Deco set updated to 1938, the year in which Anthony Asquith filmed “Pygmalion.” The décor consists mainly of an old-fashioned gramophone, a glossy checkerboard dance floor and a trio of flats on which Professor Higgins’ phonetic alphabet is emblazoned….

“The Time of Your Life,” William Saroyan’s Pulitzer-winning 1939 play about a San Francisco dive bar whose eccentric but (mostly) lovable patrons are guilty of dreaming while drinking, is rarely mounted nowadays, partly because it has 27 characters and partly because Saroyan’s brand of screwball optimism is no longer in fashion. But it’s still a good show, and Chicago’s Artistic Home, a 45-seat theater whose self-declared mission is to perform plays in “an intimate space…to touch audiences who are increasingly distanced from human contact,” has given it a revival that is touching in all the right ways.

Much of the force of Kathy Scambiatterra’s staging is rooted in the fact that it’s being done in a plain-Jane black-box storefront theater that’s scarcely bigger than the end-of-the-road waterfront honky-tonk in which “The Time of Your Life” takes place. It’s so tiny that audience members must actually use the onstage restroom at intermission. The members of Ms. Scambiatterra’s jumbo cast take full advantage of their close proximity to the seats, giving low-key performances that counterbalance Saroyan’s penchant for flamboyant overstatement….

* * *

To read my review of My Fair Lady, go here.

To read my review of The Time of Your Life, go here.

The trailer for Lyric Stage’s revival of My Fair Lady:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about jazz as a cultural signifier—and how Hugh Hefner’s Playboy helped to shape that significance. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, jazz wasn’t really born in the whorehouses of New Orleans. It was played there, though, and ever since then it’s been associated in the minds of many of its fans with the joys of sex….

No less noteworthy is the frequency with which jazz is now used in films and on TV as a musical signifier of world-weary hipness. It’s something I first noticed in 1993 when the Secret Service agent played by Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire” turned out to be (like Eastwood himself) an amateur jazz pianist who listens to Miles Davis to unwind after spending the day chasing down assassins. What was true then is true today: Davis’ cooler-than-cool music is heard on the soundtrack of a recent series of car commercials in which Matthew McConaughey plays a super-suave gambler who drives to the big game in a Lincoln MKX.

Exactly how did jazz acquire this curious cultural cachet? I commend your attention to Playboy Swings!: How Hugh Hefner and Playboy Changed the Face of Music, a well-researched, fascinatingly detailed new book by Patty Farmer….

Mr. Hefner himself has described Playboy as “a lifestyle magazine that defined what it meant to be a [single] guy,” a slick monthly that published middle-to-highbrow essays and stories by writers like William F. Buckley Jr., Norman Mailer and Vladimir Nabokov (hence the once-ubiquitous catchphrase “I read it for the articles”) interspersed with pictures of naked women. Just as essential to its success, though, were the accompanying features that told its readers how to impress women as a preliminary step to bedding them. As the first issue proclaimed, “We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

Note the strategic position of jazz in that list of topics. According to one of the magazine’s early editors, Playboy was designed to educate its naïve founder in the arcane ways of the bachelor hipster: “It told guys like him what movies to see, what books to read, how to dress…all the stuff that Hef himself didn’t know.” But Mr. Hefner did know one thing going in: He loved jazz, and he insisted that his magazine publish plenty of articles about the men who played it….

A lesser-known but identically revealing document of Mr. Hefner’s lifelong passion for jazz is “Playboy’s Penthouse,” the TV variety series that he hosted from 1959 to 1961. Purportedly taped in his own apartment (it was actually shot on a soundstage), the show featured such guests as Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Mabel Mercer….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, taped in Chicago in 1959:

“The Winning Hand,” a commercial for the Lincoln MKX directed by Gus Van Sant. The music on the soundtrack is an excerpt from Miles Davis’ improvised score for Louis Malle’s film Elevator to the Gallows: