“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.”
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
Archives for September 2015
From the diary of a peripatetic drama critic (IV)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 (cont’d) As soon as I retrieved my wandering suitcase and returned from the Hartford airport, Mrs. T and I collected our nephew Ian and his friend Max and drove down to New York. Ian recently graduated from high school and starts college this month, so we decided to mark the occasion by taking him to a Broadway show.
After much thought, I concluded that Hand to God was the best possible choice. Not only did I give the show a rave review in The Wall Street Journal, but its X-rated humor struck me as more than sufficiently scabrous to satisfy a pair of bright teenage boys. Mrs. T hadn’t accompanied me when I reviewed it in April, and I knew she’d like it, too, so I bought four orchestra tickets (incontrovertible proof of how much I’d liked the play) and took to Twitter to congratulate myself in advance on my keen understanding of the adolescent mind. No sooner did I trumpet our plans than I received a message from one of the publicists for Hand to God asking if the four of us might possibly like to go backstage after the performance to meet the cast. I accepted with alacrity.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 Ian and Max spent the day barnstorming around Manhattan while Mrs. T got her hair done and I undertook various back-in-town-for-two-days-so-better-get-it-done-now chores. We met for dinner at Blue Fin, then went to the Booth Theatre to see Hand to God, at which our guests and Mrs. T laughed so hard that I briefly wondered whether they might rupture themselves. We made our way to the stage door afterward and spent the better part of an hour chatting with Geneva Carr, Marc Kudisch, and Steven Boyer, all of whom couldn’t possibly have been nicer. Steven went so far as to don one of the hand puppets used in the show and pose for a selfie taken by Ian.
(If you think I’m a jaded theater professional, by the way, think again. The truth is that I’m every bit as star-struck as the most avid of fans, and I had to pinch myself a couple of times to make sure I was really backstage at a Broadway show.)
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 Ian and Max returned to Connecticut by train in the afternoon. As soon as they left, Mrs. T and I collected the rental car, drove to Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, and checked into the superlatively cozy Bridgeton House on the Delaware, one of our two favorite B&Bs, which happens to be within easy driving distance of the Bucks County Playhouse, whose production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee I was set to review the following night. Talk about convenient!
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 We drove to New Hope and ate a stupendously good dinner at Italian Cucina, then walked two blocks to the playhouse and saw Putnam County, which proved to be every bit as good as I’d hoped.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 This being a working trip, I got up first thing in the morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal reviews of Putnam County and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival revival of Guys and Dolls before breakfast.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 We left Bridgeton House after breakfast (fresh figs!) and drove north through the Delaware Water Gap to Ecce Bed and Breakfast, our other favorite B&B, which we love so much that we spent our honeymoon there.
I’ve written about Ecce more than once in this space since I first went there in 2005, so I won’t belabor its virtues yet again save to say that the view (Ecce is situated on a wooded bluff three hundred feet above the Delaware River) is spectacular, the breakfasts are sumptuous, and the owners (who have long since become good friends) are kind and considerate to a fault. On top of all that, the upstairs hall is decorated with a gorgeous pair of pencil-signed Al Hirschfeld lithographs of Lucille Ball and Carol Channing. I mean, what’s not to like?
No shows or deadlines—we came to Ecce to unwind, and did so successfully.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 Back home to Connecticut, where I checked my e-mail and learned that Dramatists Play Service had sent the first finished copies of the acting edition of Satchmo at the Waldorf to our New York apartment. It was a perfect finish to my busman’s semi-holiday.
(Last of four parts)
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A scene from the Broadway production of Robert Atkins’ Hand to God, starring Steven Boyer:
A scene from the Broadway production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, performed by the original cast at the 2005 Tony Awards ceremony:
Snapshot: Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer in 1965
The Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer Quintet plays Terry’s “Tete a Tete” on Jazz 625, originally telecast by the BBC on February 21, 1965:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)
Almanac: Edmund Burke on contempt and caution
“Dangers by being despised grow great; so they do by absurd provision against them.”
Edmund Burke, speech on the Petition of the Unitarians, 1792.
Lookback: on receiving a handwritten letter
From 2005:
My own hand, alas, is not so easy or rewarding. I’m left-handed, with an ink-smudging overhand hook so exaggerated that my first-grade teacher, who in 1962 was already a thoroughly cranky old woman, tried briefly and vainly to get me to write with my right hand. I’ve found penmanship awkward ever since, which is why I learned to type as a boy and why I took so readily to e-mail as a grownup. Yet my correspondent was right: convenient though e-mail is, there’s something uncanny about receiving a handwritten letter, and no less uncanny about sending one….
Read the whole thing here.
Almanac: Graham Greene on hate
“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
From the diary of a peripatetic drama critic (III)
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 Sometimes my theater-related trips resemble paid vacations with a little work thrown in. Other times, irrespective of the quality of the shows that I see, they’re just another day at the office, minus the reassuring comforts of home. That, I regret to say, was how I felt about my four-night stay in Ashland, where I saw three shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Don’t get me wrong—I like Ashland very much. The problem, as I discovered two years ago, is that I don’t especially enjoy going there by myself. Had Mrs. T accompanied me to Oregon, I doubtless would have eaten better meals and spent much more time strolling through town. Instead I mostly stuck to my hotel room, knocking out three Wall Street Journal columns and a Commentary essay about Al Hirschfeld while the summer sun shone brightly through the window. It felt as though the teacher had made me stay inside during recess. I emerged only to go to the theater, take my meals, and soak twice daily in the outdoor whirlpool.
It didn’t help that I was, as usual, moderately disoriented by the change in time zones. In addition, I find it hard to write in hotel rooms, perhaps because staying in a hotel makes me feel as though I ought to be relaxing, not working.
Mostly, though, I was demoralized by Mrs. T’s absence, enough so that I was reduced to breakfasting at the hotel, a sure sign of trouble on the horizon. (What is so depressing as the scrambled eggs served at a “complimentary expanded continental breakfast”?) As a result of all this, my overall mood, relieved only by the shows I saw, was grumpy and disagreeable. It was as if the previous day’s blissful drive through the Willamette National Forest had never happened.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 I drove from Ashland to Portland without stopping for anything other than gas, dropped off my rental car, and checked into a comfortable but nondescript airport hotel with a first-class whirlpool. As much as I like Portland, which has an excellent art museum (Clement Greenberg’s personal art collection is housed there, though you’d never guess it from the museum’s website) and terrific restaurants, I knew I wasn’t good for anything more than a quick dinner, a long soak, and an early bedtime. All I wanted was to be home.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 The horror! The horror!
It started when my flight from Portland arrived early at JFK, then waited an hour on the tarmac for a gate. Once we finally got off the plane, it took me nearly a half-hour to walk from there to the luggage carousels. (Kennedy is a very big airport.) I spent an additional half-hour waiting patiently for my suitcase, which contained all of my clothes, then went to the Delta baggage office, where I was politely informed that it had never been loaded on the plane in Portland and would probably arrive in New York the following day. By then my fellow passengers were starting to suspect the worst, with good reason: it turned out that most of their bags had been left behind.
Not wanting to stick around for the resulting riot, I boarded Kennedy’s “AirTrain” (arrgh!) for the car rental center, picked up a rental car, and drove straight into bumper-to-bumper late-night traffic. The agonizing slowness of my progress temporarily disguised the fact that Enterprise had stuck me with a lemon, a brand-new sedan whose transmission was misbehaving and which, I found out the following day, had already been recalled to the factory. I arrived in Connecticut, unfed and unwatered, at one-thirty in the morning, and fell into bed.
MONDAY, AUGUST 17 I went to a nearby Enterprise office to swap my lemon for a car that worked, then started tracking the travels of my miscreant suitcase. It reached New York in the afternoon and was sent from there to Detroit, from whence it was flown to Hartford an hour too late to be delivered to our place in Connecticut that same night. Since Mrs. T and I planned to drive to New York at noon on Tuesday, I decided to play it safe and pick the bag up at the airport first thing in the morning.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 I left the house at eight-fifteen and arrived at the Hartford airport at nine, only to find that the Delta baggage office, which was supposed to open at nine, was still shut tight. I could see my bag through the window and briefly considered breaking the glass and retrieving it, but then I recovered my senses and sat down to wait.
No one having showed up by nine-thirty, I raised a ruckus, after which somebody from Delta arrived at nine-forty-five to unlock the office and give me my bag, whose retractable handle had been broken somewhere between Portland and Hartford and could no longer be used. The baggage agent politely informed me that Delta doesn’t pay for broken retractable handles. I said something short and sharp, opened the bag to make sure that nothing was missing, and stalked out of the office.
(Third of four parts)
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The Bill Charlap Trio plays Leonard Bernstein’s “Lonely Town” (from On the Town). Peter Washington is the bassist, Kenny Washington the drummer:
A 1970 commercial for American Tourister luggage:
Just because: Elmore Leonard reads Freaky Deaky
Elmore Leonard reads the first chapter of his novel Freaky Deaky at Butler University in 2010:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)