Archives for 2016

Mrs. T and I were planning to fly down to Florida tomorrow morning and take up temporary residence on our beloved Sanibel Island, there to reflect on the events of 2016. Alas, she’s grappling with some lingering health issues that will keep us from hitting the road on schedule, so we’re going to hole up in Connecticut and drink our champagne there.

No matter where I am, I’ve got a lot to think about, much of it having to do with Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which was performed in Baton Rouge, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Sacramento, San Francisco, New Hampshire, and West Palm Beach in the year just past. I got to see several of those productions, and along the way I met up with old friends, made brand-new ones, and generally had the time of my life.

As many of you will recall, I staged the West Palm Beach production of Satchmo myself. It was my professional directing debut, and it was an unforgettable, life-changing experience. In addition to working on Satchmo, I attended the premiere of my latest collaboration with Paul Moravec, a work for chorus and orchestra called Music, Awake! It’s since been recorded by John Sinclair and the Bach Festival Society Chorus and Orchestra of Winter Park, so those of you who couldn’t be on hand for the first performance in April will get to hear what you missed in due course.

I also started writing a new play, which has since been “workshopped” (a damnably clumsy word, but I don’t know a better one) three times. If all continues to go well, I’ll tell you what it’s about at some point in January.

Needless to say, these things happened in the interstices of my day job as drama critic and arts columnist of The Wall Street Journal, in which capacity I saw and reviewed a hundred shows in New York and elsewhere in America. I also wrote two dozen “Sightings” columns for the Journal and a dozen-odd essays for Commentary and other magazines. That’s a full year’s work right there. Small wonder that I’m feeling a bit weary as 2006 staggers to a close.

I had to leave Mrs. T behind on Sanibel Island last January to open Satchmo in Chicago and San Francisco. This year, by contrast, I’m not going anywhere to do anything. We’ll be spending the whole month together, most of it in a place that we’ve come to regard in recent years as our winter home-away-from-home, and I don’t expect to feel even slightly guilty about turning loose of my everyday life.

As I wrote two years ago on a similar occasion:

I suppose I could justify this protracted stretch of inactivity by claiming that I’ve been lying fallow, letting my creative batteries recharge themselves, but I’m not going to do any such thing. I don’t think inactivity needs to be justified. It took me the better part of a lifetime to figure out that you don’t need a reason to take it easy. Now that I’ve finally learned my lesson after years of compulsive overwork, I don’t propose to unlearn it by coming up with elaborate justifications for doing what I’ve been longing to do for weeks and weeks.

Pope Francis, it seems, agrees with me. “A time of rest, for those who have completed their work, is necessary, obligatory and should be taken seriously: by spending time with one’s family and respecting holidays as moments of spiritual and physical recharging,” he recently declared. So now I have it on impeccable authority (if you believe in authority, papal or otherwise) that watching the sun set, especially on Sanibel Island, is sufficient unto the day thereof, especially when I’m in the company of Mrs. T, who likes it as much as I do.

And so ends the crowded year in which I turned sixty and embarked on what I hope will gradually evolve into yet another part-time career. In preparation for the arrival of 2017, allow me to post, as has become my custom, the Ogden Nash poem that I like to share with you each New Year’s Eve, followed by my customary end-of-the-year good wishes:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

To all of you who, like me, suspect that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, I hope that the year to come treats you not unkindly, and that your lives, like mine, will be warmed by hope and filled with love.

See you next year!

Bob Dylan and the Band perform Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on May 16, 1966:

To read more about this concert, go here.

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

“Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”

W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage”

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about Daniel Barenboim’s new YouTube channel. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

At 74, Daniel Barenboim is very much in the news. Among other things, he’s released a CD, “On My New Piano,” in which the celebrated pianist-conductor plays the music of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Scarlatti and Wagner on a brand-new concert grand designed to his own specifications. What’s more, Mr. Barenboim’s latest venture, the Barenboim-Said Academy, a school for music students from the Middle East, recently opened in Berlin, not far from the Berlin State Opera, of which he is the music director. But the most consequential of his current undertakings may prove to be one that so far appears to have received next to no publicity: Mr. Barenboim has just launched his own YouTube channel.

Go to youtube.com and search for “Daniel Barenboim: Five Minutes On…” (no quotation marks). You’ll find there a series of miniature lectures, each one five minutes long or a bit shorter, in which Mr. Barenboim discusses eight familiar works from his repertoire. They include three solos by Beethoven, two by Chopin, one by Liszt and a pair of concertos by Mozart and Brahms. Nothing about “Five Minutes On…” is at all fancy: Mr. Barenboim simply says hello, sits down at the piano and talks about the piece in question, playing a few well-chosen snippets and explaining what you’re hearing in uncomplicated, non-technical language.

The playing is beautiful, of course—Mr. Barenboim is one of the greatest pianists of his generation—but it’s the talk that matters. It turns out that in addition to being a great pianist, Mr. Barenboim also has a knack for getting straight to the point…

What we have here, in other words, is something not unlike what Leonard Bernstein was endeavoring to do in the now-legendary “Young People’s Concerts” that CBS broadcast from 1958 to 1972, all 53 of which can also be viewed on YouTube. But there’s a big difference: Each Young People’s Concert was an hour-long program in which Bernstein spoke in depth about a broad-gauge subject like “What Does Music Mean?” or “What Is Sonata Form?” In addition, the concerts were also public performances in which Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic appeared in front of large audiences consisting mostly of children. Mr. Barenboim’s “Five Minutes On…” lectures, by contrast, are bite-sized snippets that concentrate on a single piece of music, suitable for consumption on a smartphone. They’re meant for adults, not children, and the scale is intimate: Mr. Barenboim could be sitting in your living room, talking to you alone….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

“Daniel Barenboim: Five Minutes on—Frédéric Chopin—Ballade No. 1 in G-Minor”:

In addition to writing about theater and the other arts for a living, I also blog in this space purely for my pleasure. Here are ten of my favorite posts from the year almost past:

• February 8 “Turning sixty, I’m told, is a big deal. I can’t say that it feels especially big, though, nor do I feel nearly as old as I am, save on the too-frequent occasions when I have trouble pulling a name out of my hat.”

• March 28 “I’ve loved Esplanade, in which [Paul] Taylor blends walking, running, hopping, sliding, and the music of Bach into a plotless explosion of pure choreographic delight, ever since I first started looking at the dance three decades ago.”

• April 18 “This morning I fly back to New York from Winter Park, Florida, where I attended the premiere of Music, Awake! on Saturday night.”

• May 16 “I am now officially a professional stage director.”

• June 1 “You don’t have to be, or have been, a TV star to know how fast stardom fades. I wonder whether [Andy] Warhol ever thought about that: what happens when your fifteen minutes are up? Even more interesting, what happens when you outlive your fifteen minutes by…oh, fifty years?”

• June 14 “Never before have I felt so strongly that Americans are talking past instead of to one another. It is, I fear, our future and our fate—which is why I have come to believe that I will live to see Red and Blue America negotiate a ‘soft disunion.’”

• June 27 “I do suffer grievously from the sin of impatience, not with myself but with other people, as well as with such inanimate objects as elevators, stoplights, and toasters.”

• November 21 “As I walked into the kitchen to throw away an apple core, my eye happened to fall on one of the two dozen pieces of art that hang on the walls of our New York apartment.”

• November 28 “The point, I think, is that you must not be afraid to fall on your face if you want to get anywhere in life, and most especially if you want to try doing something new late in life. And if you are aware—intensely, consumingly aware—that the clock is running and time may be short, you’re less likely to be stymied by the fear of falling on your face in front of an audience.”

• December 27 “If my family had any dark secrets, they went to the grave with my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But like all families, we did have a few subjects of which we preferred not to speak save in hushed tones, foremost among them the fate of my Uncle Paul.”

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:
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Finian’s Rainbow (small-scale musical revival, G, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Encounter (one-man immersive drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)
• Sweet Charity (small-scale musical revival, PG-13, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

“Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.”

Bertrand Russell, “Recrudescence of Puritanism” (in Skeptical Essays)

Arturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony in a performance of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, originally telecast from Carnegie Hall 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)

“One of the most disconcerting, unpleasant, and sordid aspects of life is the awareness that nearly all of us find an evil deed more exciting than a good one.”

Josep Pla, The Gray Notebook (trans. Peter Bush)

If my family had any dark secrets, they went to the grave with my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But like all families, we did have a few subjects of which we preferred not to speak save in hushed tones, foremost among them the fate of my Uncle Paul.

Paul ran a service station and, later on, sold used cars. He was a beloved and trusted figure of my boyhood, so much so that I would spend the night with him and Aunt Suzy, my mother’s sister, on the rare occasions when my parents went out of town together. I remember him as a warm, affectionate man who taught me how to sing “You Are My Sunshine” and “How Dry I Am” (a grimly ironic choice of tunes, given what happened to him) and play shuffleboard (he’d painted a court on the floor of his basement). But Paul disappeared from my life in the mid-Sixties, and the only thing my parents told me at the time was that he and Suzy had gotten a divorce, an occurrence that was all but unthinkable among my mother’s people, who were the most devout of small-town churchgoers.

Paul came to our house a couple of years later for a very brief nighttime visit about which I recall nothing but the fact that it took place. If memory serves, my brother and I had already been put to bed when he unexpectedly showed up on the doorstep, and our parents didn’t get us up to see him. A few weeks after that, he was run over by a truck and killed.

My mother then told me that Paul had been an alcoholic, and that he’d stayed away from my brother and me because he didn’t want us to see what had become of him. It was the first time I’d heard the word “alcoholic,” and she had to explain to me what it meant. Suzy, she said, had left him because of his drinking, then came back when he started going to AA meetings. But he couldn’t stay sober, and when she left him again, it was for keeps. My mother said that he’d gotten drunk and wandered into the path of an oncoming truck, and she left me with the impression that she thought he’d done it deliberately.

Paul was the first person to die to whom I was close, and his death left a deep mark on my psyche. I suspect it’s the main reason why I’ve never been much of a drinker. But while my mother always spoke of him with fondness, the other members of the family never mentioned Paul again except when prompted. Some of them, I’m sure, were ashamed of him, for in those days it was widely taken for granted that alcoholism was not a disease but a moral weakness, and those who succumbed to it were viewed with contempt.

So far as I can recall, I’ve never seen a still picture of Paul, but he does appear in two of the home movies that my father shot between 1956 and 1966 and that my brother sent to me last week as a Christmas present. In the first scene, he is standing behind a ladder in the driveway of my grandmother’s home, watching as I climb to the top rung, then taking me in his arms. In the second, he is sitting beside me at my fourth birthday party. The love that we felt for one another is plain to see in both clips.

Seeing Paul after so many years made me wonder whether I might be able to find out anything more about him on the Web. I Googled his name, and this short newspaper piece, originally published in the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian in 1958, popped up:

Paul Armsby, owner of Paul’s 66 Service Station at 340 S. Sprigg St., has received a $50 award from the Phillips Petroleum Co., for giving perfect driveway service to a Phillips “mystery motorist.” In the picture he is shown at the left receiving the award from D.V. Shaner, district salesman. Others in the picture at the left are station attendants, Don Hency and Richard Gerlach.

Beyond that…nothing. Paul and Suzy had no children, and I don’t know whether any members of his own family are alive. He seems to have been born in Arkansas in 1919 or 1920, but I can find no record of his death, nor was an obituary published in any of the local newspapers. Save for that lone paragraph in the Southeast Missourian, it’s as though he’d never existed. I don’t even know where he’s buried. I greatly regret to say that I made no mention of him in the memoir of my childhood that I published in 1991, mainly because I wanted to spare Suzy’s feelings (she had not yet died when the book came out).

I find it unutterably sad that my Uncle Paul has vanished almost without trace. It puts me in mind of something that H.L. Mencken wrote in 1927:

I have done a great deal less than I wanted to do and a great deal less than I might have done if my equipment had been better, but this, at least, I have accomplished, and it is one of the principal desires of man: I have delivered myself from anonymity.

Like most of the rest of us, Paul failed to deliver himself from anonymity. All that remains of him are two short film clips, a paragraph-long newspaper item, and my clear memory of how much I loved him—and how much it hurt when I finally found out why he disappeared from my life. But I still remember him a half-century later, and I cried when I saw his face on the screen of my laptop the other day. There are worse monuments.

UPDATE: For the rest of Uncle Paul’s story, go here.