Archives for September 25, 2015

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.

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“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….

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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.

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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….

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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:

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet appears on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual. Bob Brookmeyer is the valve trombonist, Wyatt Ruther the bassist, Gus Johnson the drummer. This half-hour episode was taped in Los Angeles on July 18, 1962:

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

“It seems that in this country, you’re expected to be a specialist. People get used to you in a certain role in life, and they don’t like you to step out of it. In other countries, particularly the Latin countries, it doesn’t surprise anyone when a man is an attorney and a jazz musician, or a playwright and a painter. People in this country seem to find it hard to understand that a man can have a deep and abiding interest in one art and a lesser, but still real, interest in another.”

Gerry Mulligan, quoted in Gene Lees, “Gerry Mulligan—A Writer’s Credo,” Down Beat, January 17, 1963 (courtesy of Jazz Profiles)