Archives for December 2015

The first rehearsal for the Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf went exhilaratingly well. Barry Shabaka Henley, whom I met for the first time yesterday morning, proved to be both a first-rate actor and an unusually nice man. (He’s the tall guy at left.) Judging by what happened in the Court Theatre’s rehearsal hall on Tuesday, Barry is already well on the way to putting his personal stamp on Satchmo, just as Dennis Neal and John Douglas Thompson did before him. What happens in the rehearsal room stays in the rehearsal room, so I don’t want to be any more specific than that. Suffice it to say that he read the whole show out loud for the production team and a small audience of invited guests, and—as we say in the business—he killed.

I also got a look at the finished model for John Culbert’s set, which is already under construction on the stage of the Court. Of course I’d seen photographs of earlier versions, but standing in front of the model for the first time is always a thrill, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

No guests today. Instead, we roll up our sleeves and get down to business. Charlie Newell, the director, has strongly and excitingly individual ideas about Satchmo, and that, as I told him when we first discussed the production several months ago, is exactly what I have in mind. I don’t want a replica of any of the play’s previous productions, wonderful though they were. I want Charlie to do it his way, and he knows I mean it.

Don’t expect to hear too much more from me for the next few days. We have a lot to do between now and the first preview on January 7. Rehearsing a play is hard work—but it’s also as much fun as anything I know. That’s why they call it a play.

The Paris Opera Ballet performs Jerome Robbins’ In G Major, a ballet set to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G:

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

“‘You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely.’

“‘A bit severe, isn’t it? And a bit dangerous. Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one-half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”

Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (trans. Michael Scammell “with the collaboration of the author,” courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

A few minutes from now I’ll leave Our Girl’s apartment in Chicago and walk two blocks to the rehearsal hall where Barry Shabaka Henley, Charles Newell, and I start work later this morning on the Court Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf.

It is, I think, a good time to remind myself that this is a day to be totally present. Today there is nothing but the show: no deadlines, no worries, no morning news, no future, not even an opening night in January. This is a day to rejoice—and work.

And so…off I go. See you on the other side.

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A scene from All That Jazz, a 1979 film by Bob Fosse, starring Roy Scheider:

The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which I report on two off-Broadway premieres, Bedlam’s New York Animals and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Important Hats of the Twentieth Century. Here’s an excerpt.

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Bedlam specializes in radically original small-scale classical revivals but thrives on the unexpected. So instead of Shakespeare or Shaw, its latest production is…a musical! Truth to tell, “New York Animals,” a play by Steven Sater (“Spring Awakening”) with songs by Mr. Sater and Burt Bacharach (yes, that Burt Bacharach), doesn’t quite fill the bill, but it comes close, and Eric Tucker, Bedlam’s artistic director and resident wizard, has mounted it with his accustomed flair and resourcefulness. While the show itself has some problems, the production has none at all. It’s a miracle of frugal ingenuity, the kind of mega-ingenious zero-budget staging that makes you wonder why Broadway even bothers.

Set in Manhattan circa 1995, “New York Animals” looks at first glance like an updated version of a Julius Monk-helmed sketches-and-songs cabaret revue from the ’60s. The sketches, however, turn out to be interlocking tales of urban disaffection whose sad characters, some seemingly privileged (“I embrace my cellulite!”) and others more obviously desperate, converge in an emergency room at show’s end. The songs, which are affectingly sung by Jo Lampert and performed by a five-piece band, illustrate the story line rather than driving it, neatly splitting the difference between Mr. Bacharach’s familiar brand of glamorously romantic melancholy and Mr. Sater’s harder-edged postmodern bleakness (the first line of the first song is “Don’t f— with me”).

If “New York Animals” sounds a bit awkward, that’s how it plays, and Mr. Sater’s sketches would profit much from being more pointed. Not at all surprisingly, it’s still a work in progress—the script was not yet “frozen” when I went on Sunday—and I expect it will continue to evolve further as the run progresses. But there’s already much to like about the show…

Tell me what you laugh at and I’ll tell you how old you are. No art form is more sensitive to generational cross-currents than comedy—but nowadays American theater is increasingly in thrall to the comfy needs of 50-plus playgoers. So it’s a heartening surprise to see the Manhattan Theatre Club, most of whose subscribers appear to measure up, putting on a charming farce called “Important Hats of the Twentieth Century” that feels more like a zany cable-TV sitcom episode than an old-fashioned stage comedy.

Written by Nick Jones, who is best known for his work on “Orange Is the New Black,” “Important Hats” doesn’t exactly lend itself to terse synopsis. Imagine two clothes designers from the ’30s (Carson Elrod and Matthew Saldivar) whose rivalry assumes a planet-threatening aspect when one of them gets hold of a time-traveling hat. Got it? Part sci-fi parody, part Ayn Rand spoof and 100% screwball comedy, “Important Hats” covers a stageful of bases in a way that is less than ideally disciplined but never anything other than funny….

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To read my review of New York Animals, go here.

To read my review of Important Hats of the Twentieth Century, go here.

Carson Elrod talks about Important Hats of the Twentieth Century:

From 2005:

Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate–as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air. (Remember Daniel J. Travanti? I sure hope he had a good financial adviser.) If you’re in it for the long haul, you’ve got to make films or records. Otherwise, you’ll end your days as the answer to a trivia question, remembered only by a soft core of fast-graying fans who knew you when….

Read the whole thing here.

“But the old adage that men grow into office has not proved true in my experience. High office teaches decision-making, not substance. Cabinet members are soon overwhelmed by the insistent demands of running their departments. On the whole a period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.”

Henry Kissinger, White House Years

I noted in this space eleven years ago the death of Joseph J. Zimmermann Jr., the man who invented the answering machine. On that occasion I quoted something that H.L. Mencken told a reporter in 1946, two years before Zimmermann came up with his world-changing idea: “The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car.” Mencken was born in 1880, so that claim takes in a lot of turf, but I think he made it with a reasonably straight face. Since he didn’t much care for telephones, going so far as to claim that “nine-tenths of the people who call me by telephone I don’t want to talk to,” I also think it safe to suppose that he would have had something characteristically sulphurous to say about Mr. Zimmermann’s invention had he been aware of it.

Nowadays, of course, the old-fashioned answering machine is as quaint as the fax machine, but it was a very big deal when I first bought one back in the late Seventies. Not long ago I observed that it was in fact an invention of great cultural import:

The answering machine, by contrast, really did transform the way in which we used the telephone by making it possible to screen incoming calls. As soon as that possibility became a reality, the place of the telephone in daily life underwent a profound change, and never changed back.

Mrs. T and I were chatting about that post the other day, and we got to wondering what subsequent invention had had the biggest effect on our own everyday lives. She plumped for the GPS, and after a bit of thought I found myself agreeing with her. Yes, the iPod was a big deal, but I still have no trouble imagining life without a portable record library, which would be less convenient but by no means impossible. (Remember terrestrial radio?) By now, though, I really do find it hard to imagine how I ever got along without a GPS. Given the amount of traveling I do, it has long since become almost as essential to my present-day existence as word processing.

Like many other GPS owners we know, Mrs. T and I have anthropomorphized our machine, which we call “Miranda.” We used to amuse ourselves on occasion by imagining how she might respond to mistreatment by sending us hurtling off in the wrong direction, in the manner of “Talky Tina” from The Twilight Zone. After nine years of taking orders from Miranda and her successors, though, we now mostly take her for granted. I’m not so sure we should, for Miranda is more than a mere convenience. She’s actually changed the way in which I relate to the world—for better and worse.

On the one hand, using a GPS has made me more adventurous. Time was when driving in unfamiliar places left me feeling uncomfortable, but now, no matter where I am, I’m willing to jump in the car and start driving at random, knowing that I can go back where I came from with ease. But it’s also made me less aware of where I am at any given moment, at least when I’m using it to get from point A to point B. It seems that my travels, like my life, have become increasingly goal-directed, and Miranda has facilitated that transformation. More often than not I know where I am and where I’m going, and what happens in between is…well, less important than it used to be.

No doubt Thoreau had something relevant to say about all this, but I don’t know what it was. I do, however, know something relevant that Josef Pieper said on a not-unrelated subject:

Of course the world of work begins to become—threatens to become—our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.

That’s not me, not quite, but there are times when it looks too much like me for comfort, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to blame it on Miranda, any more than I take it personally on the rare occasions when she steers me wrong. No, I’m the problem, with modernity my unindicted co-conspirator, though “labor-saving” gadgets like the GPS and—yes—my trusty laptop don’t help.

As for these fugitive reflections, I’m damned if I know whether they’re a good thing or a bad thing, either. Once you’ve spent four decades writing for a living, you’re all too prone to behave as if no thought is worth having until it’s been written down and, if possible, published. Might I be a healthier person if I reflected purely for its own sake instead of feeling obliged (as I do) to reduce the results to words and upload them to this blog? Very likely so—but writing is what writers do, if not precisely what they are.

All of which suggests that it’d be a good thing for me to get out of town, which is what I’m about to do. I fly to Chicago later today, there to spend two weeks staying in Our Girl’s guest bedroom and rehearsing the Court Theatre’s new production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens in January. That’s not, to put it mildly, a vacation, but it’ll pull me out of my accustomed routine, which will surely be a good thing. Nor will I need Miranda to get from Our Girl’s apartment house to the Court’s rehearsal space, which is just three blocks away. I expect I can use the walk.

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Excerpts from “Living Doll,” an episode of The Twilight Zone written by Charles Beaumont, scored by Bernard Herrmann, directed by Richard C. Sarafian, and starring Telly Savalas. June Foray supplied the voice of Talky Tina:

Bernard Herrrmann’s complete score for the same episode: