Archives for October 2015

“The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.”

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

The Wall Street Journal has given me extra space today to review two Broadway revivals, Fool for Love and Old Times, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Diary of Anne Frank. Here’s an excerpt.

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When Nina Arianda made her staggeringly assured professional stage debut five years ago in “Venus in Fur,” every drama critic in town took it for granted that she was headed straight for stardom. But then she appeared in two consecutive flops, “Born Yesterday” and “Tales from Red Vienna,” and it started to look as though she might be doomed to fritter away her career on the supporting film and TV roles that had started to come her way. Now, though, Ms. Arianda has returned to Broadway in a revival of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” that originated at Massachusetts’ Williamstown Theatre Festival. Directed by Daniel Aukin, it is fully worthy of her gifts, and the results are—almost literally—explosive. This show will make you sweat.

If you don’t know “Fool for Love,” it’s a brutally compact play (four actors, no intermission, 75 minutes) set in a cheap motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert. The central characters are May and Eddie (Ms. Arianda and Sam Rockwell), a couple who can’t decide whether to have sex or kill each other. I exaggerate, but only slightly, and while their indecision has its comic side—one that Mr. Aukin has wisely emphasized in order to leaven the dramatic loaf—the obsession that has flung them together is no joke….

Dane Laffrey, the set designer, has situated the action of the play in a shallow, low-ceilinged wooden box that forces Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell to spend much of their time standing in profile to the audience. They look like a lanky pair of parentheses and act like a pair of rabid dogs in heat….

“Old Times,” Harold Pinter’s enigmatic study of the relationship between a man and two women, one of whom is his wife and the other (possibly) her ex-lover, is back on Broadway for the first time since it was originally seen there in 1971. By all rights, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production should have been good: It stars Eve Best, who was so magnetic in the most recent Broadway revivals of Mr. Pinter’s “The Homecoming” and Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” and Clive Owen, a belated Broadway debutant whose performance in “Croupier” left no doubt of his own excellence. It is, however, almost perfectly awful, and I think it’s safe to say that the fault belongs to Douglas Hodge, the director, who apparently supposes that the right way to stage “Old Times” is to camp it up….

“The Diary of Anne Frank” hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 1998, but it remains a perennial staple of regional theaters, with good reason. Adapted for the stage in 1955 by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, it’s a slightly creaky but nonetheless dramaturgically sound theatrical version of the real-life tale of a teenage Jewish girl from Amsterdam who hid from the Nazis with her family, recording her experiences in a diary that was left behind when the Franks were captured by the SS in 1944. Though Anne later died in Bergen-Belsen, her story lives on, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater is retelling it with absorbing skill in a production that is all the more moving for being played out against the black backdrop of Europe’s recrudescent anti-Semitism….

Remy Zaken, who created the role of Thea in the original Broadway production of “Spring Awakening,” is exactly right as Anne. You have no trouble at all accepting her as is a bright, eager adolescent full of half-understood longings…

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To read my review of Fool for Love, go here.

To read my review of Old Times, go here.

To read my review of The Diary of Anne Frank, go here.

The trailer for Fool for Love:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about surviving sound recordings of the speaking voices of men and women born in the nineteenth century. Here’s an excerpt.

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In 1931, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the oldest person ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, turned 90. By then the seemingly ageless judge was widely regarded as a national treasure, so CBS marked the occasion with a prime-time birthday tribute in which he spoke briefly from his home in Washington, D.C. Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and he rose to the near-final occasion (he retired from the bench ten months later and died in 1935) with characteristic grace, closing by quoting his own elegant translation of a passage from a medieval poem in praise of wine, women and song that he bent to his own austere purposes. “To live is to function,” he said. “That is all there is to living. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: ‘Death plucks my ear and says, Live—I am coming.’”

Three years ago the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’ papers are housed, launched an online “digital suite” (library.law.harvard.edu/suites/owh) that allows anyone with a computer to access its digitized 100,000-document collection of Holmesiana. I knew from having read G. Edmund White’s 2006 biography that the 1931 radio broadcast was recorded off the air and that the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’ papers are housed, possessed a tape copy of the recording. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it possible to use the Holmes Digital Suite to listen to that 1931 aircheck?

I got in touch with Harvard a few months ago and suggested that they post the broadcast online, and now they’re done so. Go here and you’ll be able to listen to a RealAudio copy. To read what Holmes said on that long-ago evening is to be stirred to the marrow. But to actually be able to hear it—to listen to the tremulous yet dignified voice of a man who met Abraham Lincoln and was wounded three times in the Civil War, then spent the better part of three decades sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court—is an experience of another order altogether.

In case you neglected to do the math, Justice Holmes was born in 1841. That makes him one of a significant number of notable men and women born in the 19th century whose voices were recorded for posterity. So far as is known, the earliest-born person to have left behind a sound recording of his speaking voice was Alfred Tennyson, who was born in 1809, the same year as Lincoln and Felix Mendelssohn. He recorded several of his poems in 1890 on a machine borrowed from Thomas Edison, and one of them, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” can be easily found on YouTube. So can the voices of, among others, Max Beerbohm, Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Browning, G.K. Chesterton, Mahatma Gandhi, O. Henry, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Lenin, H.L. Mencken, Florence Nightingale, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy (speaking in English!), Booker T. Washington, Woodrow Wilson and W.B. Yeats….

To hear these antique recordings, near-opaque though some of them are, is at once mysterious and moving…

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Read the whole thing here.

Alfred Tennyson reads “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1890:

Little Richard sings “Long Tall Sally” in Don’t Knock the Rock, a 1956 film directed by Fred F. Sears:

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

“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (courtesy of Laila Lalami)

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, most performances sold out last week, 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, 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)
• Spring Awakening (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 24, 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)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare, PG-13, remounting of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production, closes Oct. 31, original production 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 CHICAGO:
• The Price (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 22, reviewed here)
• The Tempest (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Nov. 8, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• The Time of Your Life (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• An Iliad (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BOSTON:
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)

“God! It costs you something to do good! You learn that by experience, too. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

Arturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony in Sibelius’ En Saga. This performance was originally telecast on March 15, 1952:

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