Archives for September 2015

“I make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone’s been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice—somewhat contrived, I admit—to write the man’s name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: ‘That finishes the incident, and so far as I’m concerned, that fellow.’ The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities.”

Dwight Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Connecticut revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce and the New York premiere of A.J. Gurney’s Love & Money. Here’s an excerpt.

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Alan Ayckbourn is the reigning master of the sad comedy, in which a dash of bitters adds unexpected depth to the onstage hijinks. As funny as they seem (and are) at first glance, such Ayckbourn plays as “Absurd Person Singular,” “The Norman Conquests” and “Time of My Life” cut to the dramatic quick as ruthlessly and poignantly as anything that Chekhov ever wrote. From time to time, though, Mr. Ayckbourn chooses to play his farces of marital misunderstanding straight down the middle, with results that give unfailing pleasure to those in search of nothing more than a good laugh. “Bedroom Farce,” one of his rare Broadway successes, is such a show, and Westport Country Playhouse, which has staged five of his plays in the past decade, is giving it a handsomely cast, precision-tooled revival directed by John Tillinger, a famously expert farceur, that makes the most of every twist in the plot.

Mr. Ayckbourn loves his scenic gimmicks, and “Bedroom Farce,” first performed in 1975, features one of the simplest and best: The set consists of three separate bedrooms. The first one belongs to Ernest and Delia (Paxton Whitehead and Cecilia Hart), the middle-aged parents of Trevor (Carson Elrod), a flighty fellow whose marriage to the neurotically self-conscious Susannah (Sarah Manton) is headed for the rocks. Bedroom No. 2 belongs to the newly married Malcolm and Kate (Scott Drummond and Claire Karpen), who are throwing a housewarming party. In addition to Trevor, Susannah, Malcolm and Kate, the guests include Nick and Jan (Matthew Greer and Nicole Lowrance), the occupants of Bedroom No. 3. Nick, alas, has thrown his back out and is confined to bed. Too bad for him, since Jan used to be Trevor’s girlfriend and is still susceptible—up to a point—to his charms.

You can probably guess some of what happens next, but Mr. Ayckbourn, as always, keeps the fast balls flying…

When he’s good, nobody’s better than A.R. Gurney, the author of “Love Letters” and “Sylvia” (which will have its long-overdue Broadway premiere in October) and a peerless chronicler of the protracted decline of America’s WASP ruling class. But he is, like many other similarly prolific artists, an in-and-out runner whose work varies widely in quality. Unlike its predecessor, the outstanding “Family Furniture,” “Love & Money,” Mr. Gurney’s 48th play, is light and slight, more like an extended comic sketch (an hour and 15 minutes) than a full-fledged show. As is often the case with his lesser efforts, it’s also over-explicit in its treatment of one of his preferred themes, the devastating effects of money on the souls of those who inherit it.

Cornelia Cunningham (Maureen Anderman), the principal character, is an upper-crust New Yorker who in old age finds herself beset with an inflamed case of liberal guilt which she is endeavoring to assuage by giving away all her worldly goods. Nothing surprising comes of her open-handedness, but Mr. Gurney rings his changes with smooth skill, squeezing solid chuckles out of Cornelia’s plight….

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To read my review of Bedroom Farce, go here.

To read my review of Love & Money, go here.

The trailer for Bedroom Farce:

Jacques d’Amboise and Melissa Hayden dance George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux on an episode of Voice of Firestone telecast in 1962. The music, originally written by Tchaikovsky for inclusion in Swan Lake, was subsequently dropped from the score and not rediscovered until 1953. Balanchine choreographed it in 1960:

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

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

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, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, virtually 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, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, many performances sold out last week, 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 NEXT WEEK IN NEW HOPE, PENN:
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, G/PG-13, extended through Sept. 13, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS.:
• Mother of the Maid (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Weir (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

MONDAY, AUGUST 10 I’m not afraid to fly anymore, but I still hate it with a passion. I sometimes say that The Wall Street Journal pays me to sit in airports and on airplanes, not to write about the plays I see once I finally get to wherever I’m going. My recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was a case in point—not horrific, just disagreeable, rather like a protracted bout of chronic but tolerable pain.

Judging by the preponderance of evidence, I might as well stay up all night before embarking on an early-morning transcontinental flight. Yet I find it impossible to do so, even though I never manage to get more than three hours’ sleep. You’d think I would have known better this time, seeing as how I had to hit the road at five-thirty in order to reach Kennedy Airport in time to stumble through security and board a plane bound for Portland. No such luck: I didn’t turn the lights out until three-thirty.

Why Portland? Because there are no nonstop flights from the New York area to Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. You have to fly somewhere else, usually Los Angeles or San Francisco, then change planes, and long experience has taught me that this is more flying than I care to do in a single day. So I decided to fly into Portland and drive from there to Eugene, which is roughly halfway to Ashland, which is three hundred miles from Portland.

The flight itself was uneventful. Suffice it to say that I amused myself by listening to my iPod and watching a couple of old movies, and that I felt only moderately battered when we finally landed in Portland. Alas, the drive that followed was unpleasant in every possible way. As I tweeted shortly after checking into my Eugene hotel, “The highways of Oregon are made of coarse-ground rubble lightly coated with used motor oil. So are the drivers.” Had it not been for the whirlpool and Dungeness crab chowder at Valley River Inn, I might well have turned around and gone back home.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11 Twitter being what it is, I heard the next morning from a sympathetic Oregonian who advised me to get off the interstate just south of Eugene on Highway 58 and spend the next couple of hours driving through the Willamette National Forest. It would, he assured me, soothe my soul.

I took his advice, and within a few minutes I found myself approaching the Lowell Covered Bridge, which was so pretty that I pulled off the highway for a closer look. It was a good omen. The rest of the trip was exactly as advertised, and the further I drove, the happier I felt. I ascended by easy stages into the Cascades, noting the terse signs that indicated the changing altitude and other relevant local phenomena: ELK. ROCKS. SLIDES. The traffic on the two-lane highway was sparse, the views breathtaking. It was as if I’d somehow wandered into a mural by Neil Welliver. Every time I passed an RV, I recalled my as-yet-unfulfilled dream of renting a Steinbeck-sized camper and driving from coast to coast without benefit of itinerary, governed solely by whim. Alas, Mrs. T would never go for it—she likes to plan ahead—but the dream, inspired by my youthful admiration for Charles Kuralt, lingers in my soul to this day.

Somewhere along the way it hit me: Nobody in the world knows where I am right now. That thought filled me with a pleasure bordering on ecstasy. At fifty-nine, I find that my life is at the mercy of curtain times, deadlines, and endless responsibilities, and I spend far too much of it sitting in front of a laptop, plugged into the world. Now the plug had been pulled, if only for a day. No one was waiting for me in Ashland, nor did I have a show to see that evening, and Mrs. T, who was tired of travel, had stayed behind in Connecticut. I was beholden only to myself.

At length I reached Odell Lake and noticed that both my stomach and my gas tank required attention. A sign told me where to fill the former, and shortly thereafter I pulled into the parking lot of Odell Lake Lodge & Resort, a rustic mountain hideaway patronized by outdoor types. I went into the restaurant and ordered a smoked salmon salad sandwich, and the young waiter brought me a thick slab of fish stuffed between two buns. I took a savory bite, then asked him, “Did you guys smoke this fish here?”

“Sure,” he said matter-of-factly, as if such culinary miracles were commonplace.

After lunch I picked up an Odell Lake Lodge brochure at the front desk and poked my head into one of the rough-hewn cabins, longing as I did so to shred my schedule and spend the rest of the week there. Then I drove to the nearest gas station. As I filled the tank, my long-forgotten cellphone rang for the first time in two days. It was Mrs. T, calling all the way from the other side of North America to see how I was.

“You won’t believe where I am right now,” I said, the spell of the Cascades not yet broken.

“Probably not,” she replied.

(To be continued)

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The Lemonheads sing “The Outdoor Type”:

Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys perform “Invitation to the Blues” on a 1959 episode of Country Style, USA, a TV series produced by the U.S. Army. The song was written by Roger Miller, who sings the backup vocals in this performance:

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