Archives for September 2015

I reviewed Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, edited by Sarah Weinman, in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Library of America, which specialized once upon a time in reprinting what its dust jackets continue to describe as “America’s best and most significant writing,” has long since succumbed to mission creep. These days it’s as likely to publish Kurt Vonnegut as Edith Wharton, and a fast-growing chunk of its catalog consists of mystery novels and other crime fiction by writers both familiar (Dashiell Hammett) and obscure ( David Goodis). Now comes “Women Crime Writers,” a two-volume anthology edited by Sarah Weinman, a respected critic of the sanguinary genre, that contains eight novels by seven obscure authors and a ringer, Patricia Highsmith, who is still widely remembered for having written “Strangers on a Train” and created Tom Ripley, the sociopath you love to hate,

So are these novels good, significant, neither, or both?

The fact that they were written by women is of no great consequence in and of itself. Women have been writing successful crime novels since the 19th century. Indeed, most of the books in “Women Crime Writers” were popular when they first came out, and Vera Caspary’s “Laura” (1943), Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place” (1947), Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s “The Blank Wall” (1947, filmed as “The Reckless Moment”), and Charlotte Armstrong’s “Mischief” (1950, filmed as “Don’t Bother to Knock”) were later turned into movies that starred such A-list actors as Humphrey Bogart, James Mason, Marilyn Monroe and Gene Tierney. Yet none of them, not even Highsmith’s “The Blunderer” (1954), managed to make posterity’s cut. What, then, makes them worthy of revival now?

The answer is that they are all exceptionally fine, as much so as any of the crime novels written by men that were published in this country in the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, I wouldn’t hesitate to stack “The Blunderer,” “In a Lonely Place” and Margaret Millar’s “Beast in View” (1955) up against the best work of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (who was Millar’s husband), both of whom have already been declared significant by the Library of America.

But the other books in “Women Crime Writers,” very much including Helen Eustis’s “The Horizontal Man” (1946) and Dolores Hitchens’s “Fool’s Gold” (1958), are closely comparable in quality to their companions: Each of them is smartly plotted, tautly written, sharply characterized and not at all dated….

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Read the whole thing here.

The opening sequence of The Reckless Moment, Max Ophüls’ 1949 film version of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, starring Joan Bennett and James Mason:

“The Passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” a 1930 British Movietone newsreel sequence in which the creator of Sherlock Holmes talks about his most famous literary creation:

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

“‘What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,’ returned my companion, bitterly. ‘The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done.’”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two out-of-town shows, a Chicago revival of The Price and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere of Head Over Heels. Here’s an excerpt.

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For all his fame, Arthur Miller was never all that commercially successful. Only two of his plays, “Death of a Salesman” and “The Price,” ran for more than a year on Broadway, and “The Price,” though it was telecast on NBC in 1971 and continues to receive occasional high-profile revivals, isn’t nearly as well known as “Salesman.” So when Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company announced that it was staging “The Price” and that the cast would include Mike Nussbaum, I knew I had to be there. Mr. Nussbaum (who is, believe it or not, 91 years old) isn’t widely known outside his home town, but he’s one of America’s best character actors. I’ve seen him in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim, and he’s always knocked me flat. This time, however, he’s outdone himself—though not at the expense of the production, which is so unremittingly taut that I found it all but impossible to look away from the stage long enough to scribble notes on what I was seeing. Maybe that’s the definition of a really good show: one that Mr. Nussbaum can’t steal because everybody else in the cast is as good as he is….

Part of what makes “The Price” so good is that Miller somehow managed to steer clear of the bloviatory sermonizing of his other plays, “Salesman” in particular. He claimed long after the fact that it was really an allegory of America’s involvement in Vietnam, but if so, he covered his symbolic tracks so carefully that it’s hard to see what he meant. Far from being obviously political, “The Price” is a life study of the power of unacknowledged pride to corrode family ties, and though the last 15 minutes are a bit stagy, that doesn’t make them any less riveting.

Louis Contey, who directed TimeLine’s marvelously low-keyed 2010 production of “Frost/Nixon,” has worked no less subtle wonders with “The Price.” I’ve never seen four actors listen so closely to their onstage colleagues: They seem to hang on one another’s words, thereby drawing you into the sticky web of mistrust in which their characters are trapped….

Jeff Whitty’s “Head Over Heels” is a new jukebox musical in which the punkish power-pop songs of the Go-Go’s (“We Got the Beat”) are made to serve as musical accompaniment to an extremely free verse adaptation of “Arcadia,” Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, whose sexy plot has a startlingly modern feel. I relished the ingeniousness with which Mr. Whitty has slotted the songs into the unfolding dramatic action, and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s production is frisky and genial. Not so, alas, the book, unless you go in for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire iambic-pentameter humor…

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To read my review of The Price, go here.

To read my review of Head Over Heels, go here.

A scene from TimeLine Theatre’s production of The Price:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider the question of why classic big-cast plays are vanishing from America’s stages—and offer some suggestions for what to do about it. Here’s an excerpt.

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Three years ago, an unknown ensemble called the Bedlam Theatre Company set up shop in a grubby off-off-Broadway house and performed George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” which calls for some two dozen actors, with a cast of four. It was the most improbable Shaw revival I’d ever seen—and the most exciting.

Today Bedlam is a major name in New York theater, as well as a sign of the times. Our cash-strapped drama companies have been increasingly disinclined in recent years to revive budget-busting big-cast plays like “Saint Joan.” I first took note of that tendency in this space in 2013, and it’s grown even more pronounced since then. To be sure, Broadway does exhume big-cast classics on occasion: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for example, has been done there nine times, most recently in 2012. But the only plays of that kind that get done with any regularity nowadays, whether in New York or by regional companies, are such well-worn single-set chestnuts as “Streetcar,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Our Town” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” Fine plays all—but there’s more to large-scale theater than familiar staples.

The success of Bedlam’s blazingly imaginative reworking of “Saint Joan” pointed to one way for cash-conscious drama companies to present big-cast plays without dynamiting their bank accounts: Cut the casts by doubling, tripling and quadrupling the roles. Other companies have grappled with the same problem by teaming up to mount expensive shows that they couldn’t afford to produce separately.

One way or another, though, American theater is urgently in need of new solutions to the big-cast problem. Essential parts of the theatrical repertory are falling into disuse. In the hope of moving them out of the warehouse and back onstage again, I offer this list of six significant large-cast plays, only one of which has been seen on Broadway in the past two decades, that deserve to go to the top of the priority list. No, they’re not cheap to do—but they have solid track records of audience success….

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Read the whole thing here.

Vivien Leigh stars in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, adapted for TV by Ellen M. Violett, directed by Henry Kaplan, and originally telecast in England in 1959 on ITV Play of the Week:

Bill Monroe plays “My Last Days on Earth,” which he wrote when he was being treated for colon cancer in 1981. He died in 1996:

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

“There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814

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, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young 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, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Guys and Dolls (musical, G, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• You Never Can Tell (Shaw, PG-13, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• An Iliad (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Island (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• The Twelve-Pound Look (one-act comedy, G, not suitable for children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NEW HOPE, PENN:
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, G/PG-13, extended through Sept. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• Bedroom Farce (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)