Archives for December 2015

I attended my final rehearsal for the Court Theatre’s upcoming production of Satchmo at the Waldorf on Saturday. On Sunday morning I flew back to New York for the opening night of the new Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which I’ll be reviewing in The Wall Street Journal later this week. Now I’m en route to rural Connecticut and my beloved Mrs. T via Amtrak, and I can’t wait to reach them both.

For the past two weeks, though, I’ve been up to my ears in Satchmo, working hand in hand with Barry Shabaka Henley, Charles Newell, and the staff of the Court. Shabaka (as we call him) is a spectacularly gifted actor who has flung himself with breathtaking abandon into the demanding triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis. I’ve long thought that Charlie is one of the best directors in America, and having watched him up close, I’m floored by his unflagging creativity and commitment. As for his colleagues, they are without exception both competent and nice, a combination that is gratifying beyond belief. If you suspect that I’m exaggerating…well, I was there, and I hated to go.

On the other hand, I also hated being away from Mrs. T for so long, and when I return to Chicago to see the show on January 10, three days after the first preview performance of Satchmo, it will be with eyes refreshed by a three-week-long separation. I’m eager to be home again, and almost as eager to return to Florida’s Sanibel Island, which Mrs. T and I have come in recent years to regard as our home away from home.

All true—and yet Satchmo and my three operatic collaborations with Paul Moravec have taught me that a rehearsal room is the next best thing to paradise, the great good place where you get to spend hours on end doing the kind of work that doesn’t feel like work at all. To be sure, I wrote three pieces and spent many happy hours with Our Girl during my two weeks in Chicago, but for the most part I ate and slept Satchmo at the Waldorf, and along the way I made a couple of dozen new and wonderful friends. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Yes, I’ll be keeping in close touch with the Court throughout the next three weeks. Among other things, I’ll be receiving daily rehearsal reports via e-mail from Amanda Keener-Frederick and Heather Bannon, the production stage manager and assistant stage manager. I’ll also be on call to answer questions from Charlie, Shabaka, or any of the Court’s other staffers. So I won’t be completely cut off from Satchmo. Nor do I expect to feel needlessly nostalgic about Chicago in January when I’m sitting on the porch of our Sanibel Island bungalow, a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico. But I also know that no matter what else I’m doing during my ten days on Sanibel, the Court Theatre will never be very far from my mind.

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Aretha Franklin sings “Come Back to Me,” at a 1968 concert in Stockholm. The song is from the score of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner:

Diana Adams and Nicholas Magallanes dance the grand pas de deux from George Balanchine’s 1954 version of The Nutcracker. The music is by Tchaikovsky. This studio performance was originally telecast by the CBC on March 7, 1957:

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

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains my best-theater-of-2015 column. Among those present:

Best ensemble. I’ve yet to see a more consistently fine group of actors than the five women who appeared in Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” which just ended its run at the Public Theater and is bound for Broadway next March with the original cast intact….

Best revival of a modern play. Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company outdid itself with Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” directed with quiet tautness by Louis Contey and featuring the the 91-year-old Mike Nussbaum, who grows younger by the year….

Playwright of the year. Katori Hall nailed the honors for 2015 with a premiere, “The Blood Quilt” at Washington’s Arena Stage, and a revival, Lyric Stage’s Boston production of “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.” I rank her next to Amy Herzog as the top up-and-comer among under-40 playwrights….

You can probably guess which show I picked as best musical, but to see my other picks and runners-up, including the best play, director, and company of 2015, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review A Wilder Christmas, an important off-Broadway revival of two rarely seen one-act plays by Thornton Wilder. Here’s an excerpt.

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For most of us, Thornton Wilder is a man of one play, “Our Town.” But he wrote many other plays, two of which, “The Matchmaker” and “The Skin of Our Teeth,” were equally big hits, as well as a number of shorter works that get done from time to time—usually by students—but are almost never produced professionally. Blessings, then, on the Peccadillo Theater Company for giving us “A Wilder Christmas,” a flawlessly staged double bill of rarely seen one-act plays by Wilder, “The Long Christmas Dinner” and “Pullman Car Hiawatha,” that are as extraordinary in their own ways as “Our Town.”…

In “The Long Christmas Dinner,” first performed in 1931, the scene is the dining room of the Bayards, an upper-middle-class American family circa 1840. The family is sitting down to turkey and stuffing, but there’s no food to be seen and no scenery save for the table and chairs and a pair of “portals” on either side of the stage, one green and leafy and the other bare and bleak. For this is no ordinary dinner: According to the stage directions, “Ninety years are traversed in this play which represents in accelerated motion 90 Christmas dinners in the Bayard household.”…

In “Pullman Car Hiawatha,” first performed the following year, the scene is a sleeper car on a train going from New York to Chicago. We see five lower berths and three compartments, all represented by simple chairs and benches, and we are introduced by a genial “stage manager” (Michael Sean McGuinness) to 10 passengers who are traveling west at Christmastime. One is a woman (Giselle Wolf) who is being escorted to an insane asylum, another a housewife (Anna Marie Sell) who will die en route. Yet “Pullman Car Hiawatha” is no “Grand Hotel”-style melodrama but a fanciful group portrait of the passengers and their places in the world…

Though both plays are shot through with darkness and sorrow, there is nothing lugubrious about them. “Sad things aren’t the same as depressing things,” one of the Bayards says. “I must be getting old: I like them.” So will you—though you’ll shed more than a few tears as you watch the characters come to terms with the passage of time and the inevitability of death….

Despite their comparative obscurity, “The Long Christmas Dinner” and “Pullman Car Hiawatha” are profoundly poetic miniature masterpieces, and I doubt you’ll ever see either one done better.

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Read the whole thing here.

To listen to or download “Thornton Wilder, Keeper of the Time Capsule,” an episode of NBC’s Biography in Sound, go here.

In this 1957 radio documentary, narrated by Garson Kanin, Wilder can be heard reading excerpts from The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town. Also featured are Isabel Wilder, Wilder’s sister, and Jed Harris, the director of the original 1938 Broadway production of Our Town.

Richard Burton and Julie Andrews sing “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961. The song is from Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and the staging, by Moss Hart, is from the original Broadway production:

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

“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”

Stephen King, Christine

The weather in Chicago, which has been unseasonably warmish since my arrival last week, is finally starting to get disagreeable, and it rained yesterday morning. So what? Well, it happens that while rehearsals for the Court Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf normally run from ten a.m. to four p.m., the specific starting and stopping times can change from day to day. That’s one of the reasons why Amanda Weener-Frederick, our omnicompetent stage manager, sends out via e-mail a call sheet after each rehearsal reminding us of when to show up and what we’ll be working on the following day.

Unfortunately, the call sheet doesn’t work if you don’t remember what it says, and so I marched out of Our Girl’s apartment sans umbrella (I neglected to bring one to Chicago) at 9:20 yesterday morning, having forgotten that Wednesday’s rehearsal started at eleven, not ten. I arrived shortly thereafter at the Court’s rehearsal hall, whose door, not surprisingly, was locked. As the rain pitter-pattered on my bare head, I emitted a twelve-letter word that is spoken out loud sixteen times in Satchmo. Then I turned around, stepped into a deep puddle, and repeated the word in question, only louder. Vexed well beyond belief, I made my way to a coffee shop two blocks away, only to discover that it didn’t have wi-fi. This time I kept my feelings to myself.

Having no good alternative, I sat down, ordered a café mocha, pulled out my MacBook Air, and started working on an essay about tap dancing that I’m writing for Commentary. Before I knew it, an hour had flown by. I paid my tab, went back to the rehearsal hall, told my tale to my greatly amused colleagues, and went back to work.

That’s how theater is made.