Archives for December 2015

Irving Berlin sings “God Bless America” as part of a tribute to his eightieth birthday telecast on The Ed Sullivan Show on May 5, 1968. He wrote the song in 1918. It was first performed in 1938 and published the following year:

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

“The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”

Henry Kissinger, “Bureaucracy and Policymaking: The Efect of Insiders and Outsiders on the Political Process”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of David Mamet’s China Doll. Here’s an excerpt.

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“China Doll” is a new two-man play by one of America’s best living playwrights, starring one of America’s greatest actors. In recent weeks, however, it’s also become a buzz machine: Has David Mamet, who is 68, lost his fastball? Is Al Pacino, who is 75, really reading his lines off concealed teleprompters? Over and above the gossip, it’s a matter of humiliating record that “The Anarchist,” Mr. Mamet’s last play, crashed and burned three years ago, closing on Broadway after 17 performances, while the one that preceded it in 2009, “Race,” was good enough but not up to form.

So what about “China Doll”? Well, it turns out to be a strongly wrought story of considerable moral complexity, one that will hold your attention all the way to the brutal end. I can’t yet tell you whether it has the legs of “American Buffalo” or “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but I do know that I want to see it again—and while I believe Mr. Pacino has failed to do it justice, I’m still glad I got to see him give it a try.

Mr. Pacino plays Mickey Ross, an immensely rich businessman and behind-the-scenes political donor who has taken unto himself a much younger mistress who never appears onstage and whom he will pay any price to please. Long past his prime, he knows exactly why she’s interested in him, and admits it to Carson (Christopher Denham), his protégé-flunky: “Is it youth or beauty? No. It’s wealth.” But Mickey is old enough to be willing to settle for the cold comfort of what Robert Frost called “boughten friendship,” and he is so besotted with her favors that he makes the mistake of paying more attention to his mistress than to his business, at which point the ever-circling sharks smell blood in the water and move in.

This is, of course, a quintessentially Mametian situation, and it’s also a promising subject for a play, especially in our gaudy age of super-wealth. But what makes “China Doll” so interesting is that Mr. Mamet, who in his previous plays has taken what I think could be fairly be called a suspicious view of women, paints Mickey not as a victim of their wiles but as a Lear-like titan whose problems spring from within himself. As played by Mr. Pacino, he is seedy, vulnerable and unexpectedly weak…

Yes, he’s using teleprompters—you can see them if you know where to look—and though he isn’t at all obvious about it, I never felt that he was at ease with his lines. Especially in the first act, his pace is much slower than you expect it to be. Is this a purposeful choice, a way of showing us that Mickey’s powers are failing? Or is Mr. Pacino himself no longer quite equal to the fearful demands of mastering the two-hour-long script of what is for all intents and purposes a one-and-a-half-man play?…

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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about a long-forgotten but incomparably vivid stage memoir, Emlyn Williams’ George. Here’s an excerpt.

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For years I thought that “Act One” was the best book of its kind ever written. Then a theatrical friend sent me Emlyn Williams’ “George: An Early Autobiography.” I gulped it down in two breathless sittings, at the end of which I knew that as fine as “Act One” is, “George” is even finer….

Williams was best known for his plays, two of which, “Night Must Fall” (1935) and “The Corn Is Green” (1938), were successfully filmed in Hollywood and continue to be revived on both sides of the Atlantic. But he was also a magnetic actor with a warm bass-baritone voice and an unnerving knack for playing charming psychopaths. He starred in the original London productions of “Night Must Fall” (in which he played a roguish multiple murderer) and “The Corn Is Green” and Terence Rattigan’s “The Winslow Boy,” then spent the second half of his life writing and touring the world in a series of one-man shows. The best known of them, “Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens” (1950), was the first one-man play about a major historical figure…

Noël Coward, who knew Williams well, described his life as “the Cinderella story of all time.” Indeed, his childhood and youth, of which “The Corn Is Green” is a fictionalized account, border on the unbelievable. Born George Emlyn Williams in 1905 in a tiny coastal village in north Wales, he was the oldest son of a hard-drinking sailor turned pub-keeper and his prudish, long-suffering wife. Young George, as he was then known, might well have become a common laborer save for the fact that Sarah Grace Cooke, one of his schoolteachers, noticed that he was exceptionally bright and took him under her generous wing. (Bette Davis played her in the 1945 film version of “The Corn Is Green.”) Seven years later, he won a French scholarship to Oxford, where he started going to the theater obsessively and resolved to spend the rest of his life on stage. In 1927 he landed a supporting part in a West End hit called “And So to Bed,” writing a hit of his own, “A Murder Has Been Arranged,” three years after that. He never looked back.

In “George,” which comes to an end as the curtain is about to go up on the opening night of “And So to Bed,” Williams tells his tale with a winning blend of nostalgia and candor (he is even forthright about his bisexuality, a topic not often broached in print in 1961). Welsh was his native tongue, and it’s easy to hear its ripely lyrical cadences in his reminiscences of the splendors and miseries of village life….

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Read the whole thing here.

To listen to Emlyn Williams’ 1955 appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, go here.

A scene from Irving Rapper’s 1945 film of The Corn Is Green, starring John Dall (playing the role created on stage by Williams) and Bette Davis:

Emlyn Williams reads Charles Dickens’ “The Signalman,” an excerpt from Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens:

An assemblage by Jon Hancock of fragmentary surviving newsreel footage and still photographs of Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, featuring Harry James on trumpet, Gene Krupa on drums, and Jess Stacy on piano. The Carnegie Hall performance of “Sing, Sing, Sing” is heard on the soundtrack. The closing seconds of the performance are synchronized with the film:

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

“Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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, most 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)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• Spring Awakening (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 24, reviewed here)
• Sylvia (comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 24, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, closing Jan. 3, 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)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LOS ANGELES:
• Guys and Dolls (drama, PG-13, remounting of Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, closes Dec. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN RED BANK, N.J.:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Fool for Love (drama, R, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

“Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.”

Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary