Archives for 2015

On Sunday I took Mrs. T, who likes science fiction, to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s the first Star Wars film that I’ve seen since 1980. I saw the original Star Wars (which I found charming) and The Empire Strikes Back when they were new and I was young, after which I decided that twice was enough.

In case you’re wondering, The Force Awakens bored me cross-eyed, which is not the best way to watch a 3-D movie. (For the record, Mrs. T felt the same way.) As David Thomson said of Jaws, the Blockbuster That Started It All, “It is zero to the power of ten.” Yes, I like good clean fun as much as the next guy—I am, lest we forget, the drama critic who gave thumbs-up to The Wedding Singer—but I do expect somewhat more out of a film than pretty faces, continuous explosions, a recycled score, and dialogue as unmemorable as a lukewarm bowl of cafeteria soup.

To all this I need only add that the American film industry has now, it would seem, attained the perigee of decadence: it has given us, courtesy of J.J. Abrams, a totally derivative hommage to a totally derivative hommage.

Here endeth the lesson.

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The climactic sword fight from The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone. The score is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold:

George Balanchine’s Ballo della Regina, choreographed in 1978 and danced by Merrill Ashley, Robert Weiss, and New York City Ballet. The score is Verdi’s ballet music for Don Carlos. This performance was taped for telecast on PBS’ Dance in America in 1979:

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

“Grief stabs in the back, unawares.”

Emlyn Williams, George: An Early Autobiography

An excerpt from City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, my first book, published in 1991.

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Not long after Thanksgiving, my mother would spend the better part of a Saturday afternoon making Christmas cookies and filling two round aluminum tins with dark brown squares of homemade chocolate fudge so rich that we were allowed to eat only one piece at a sitting. David and I cut the sticky cookie dough into stars and bells and silhouettes of Santa Claus and lovingly laid each piece on a greased cookie sheet. The Santa Claus cookies were special, for I took Santa Claus seriously. I left him a glass of milk and a plate of Christmas cookies before going to bed on Christmas Eve, and they were gone by sunup. When I was six years old, my family moved to 713 Hickory Drive, a house without a chimney. We had a long, tense family discussion that year about how Santa Claus would be able to get into our new house to bring us our presents. My father, a true man of the world, calmed me down by explaining that Santa Claus had a master key that unlocked the front door of every house on earth.

One terrible morning, my Sunday-school teacher announced in a matter-of-fact voice that there was no Santa Claus, a piece of news that left me choking back tears for the rest of the day. It took a little while for me to figure out that since the presents that magically appeared under the tree every year weren’t coming from the North Pole, they must be stashed somewhere in the house. That was when I gave up on Santa Claus and took matters into my own hands. I worked my way through all the upstairs closets. I opened every drawer and inspected every shelf that I was tall enough to reach. I spent whole afternoons quietly poking around the basement, a dark, cluttered cavern full of dusty shelves and moldy cardboard boxes, every one of which had to be opened and checked out.

Hunting for Christmas presents became an annual ritual, one that helped to ease me through a bad patch in my childhood: the year we added two rooms to 713 Hickory Drive. I don’t think my parents ever quite understood how frightening it is for a child to see his home torn up and transformed right before his eyes. To make matters even worse, my very own bedroom was schedule for demolition. After years of sharing a room with my brother, I had been allowed to move into the guest bedroom, which contained a phonograph and a long bookshelf and a double bed with flabby springs and a soft mattress. No sooner did the carpenters show up than this sumptuous retreat vanished in a cloud of sawdust. Before the week was out, my bedroom had become a hallway and four clothes closets. My father swore I’d have a bigger bedroom, but I didn’t care. I was furious.

My fury softened after I moved into my parents’ old bedroom, a bright and spacious corner room complete with half-bath, and it disappeared altogether as soon as I learned that one of the new closets would be lined with cedar panels. I loved the tart, cinnamonlike fragrance of cedar, so much so that I occasionally sat in the closet and read books by flashlight. Within a few months, it was so full of clothes that I couldn’t sit down anymore. By that time, though, I had a more compelling interest in the cedar closet, for I discovered one December afternoon that my parents were using it to hide Christmas presents. This discovery, about which I said nothing for several years, made it possible for me to keep track of the arrival of incoming presents. It also taught me how satisfying it is to keep a secret.

When the top shelf of the cedar closet was filled to the ceiling with toys, I knew it was time to bundle up, jump in the car, and drive down snowy country roads to spend Christmas Eve with the family. My grandmother started cooking when the sun came up, and by the time we got to Diehlstadt, you could smell the turkey and dressing a block away. After the last roll was buttered and the last gooey dessert tasted, we loosened our belts and sat down in the living room, where a scrawny little Christmas tree shed pine needles on an enormous mound of gifts. My grandmother invariably bought pathetic-looking Christmas trees whose limp branches drooped toward the floor like the arms of a starving man. I can’t imagine where she got them. Maybe she grew them in the root cellar out back….

Once we got home, David and I put out milk and cookies for Santa Claus and went to bed. Though we usually tried to stay up as late as we could, we never complained about going to bed early on Christmas Eve. We knew that the sooner we went to sleep, the sooner we would wake up and run down the hall to the living room in our pajamas and start tearing open presents….

My mother tucked me in and sang a chorus of “Winter Wonderland,” my favorite lullaby. Then I closed my eyes tightly and listened for the faint rustle of boxes being pulled out of the cedar closet. Weary from the long, happy day, I soon fell fast asleep.

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Louis Armstrong sings “Winter Wonderland” in 1952. The arrangement is by Gordon Jenkins:

Jordan de Souza and the CBC/McGill Youth Choir perform Benjamin Britten’s “There Is No Rose” (from A Ceremony of Carols), accompanied by Valérie Milot on harp:

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

“There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.”

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

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)
• China Doll (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, 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, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Spring Awakening (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 24, reviewed here)
• Sylvia (comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 24, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• 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:
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• A Wilder Christmas (drama, G, too complicated for children, extended through Jan. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, closes Jan. 3, original production reviewed here)

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

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

To learn more about the history of this recording, go here.