Archives for January 2016

“Actors shouldn’t campaign because they live in another world from ordinary people. If actors got an ounce of sense with every dollar they made, it would be all right.”

Walter Brennan (quoted in Bob Thomas, “Actors Split Over Right to Campaign,” Oakland Tribune, April 6, 1948)

Satchmo at the Waldorf opened to a sold-out house on Saturday at Chicago’s Court Theatre. The first-nighters were booming and zooming, and Barry Shabaka Henley fed off their energy all evening long. On Sunday I saw the show twice more, taking six pages of detailed notes that I’ll use in putting together my own production, which opens on May 13 at Palm Beach Dramaworks. The Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune reviews were posted on line a few minutes before the Sunday matinee got underway, and both were excellent. In short, we’re off to a good start.

It was a sentimental occasion for me. Kathy, my sister-in-law, came up from Missouri to see the show, as did a number of high-school and college friends whom I hadn’t seen for years. (One of them, Melodie Powell, is the daughter of Richard Powell, my very first music teacher.) Mrs. T, alas, is no longer equal to the rigors of Chicago in January—it’s two degrees above zero here as I write these words—so she stayed behind on Sanibel Island, sensibly but regretfully. Our Girl in Chicago, my erstwhile co-blogger and all-time best friend, served as her stand-in, and I couldn’t have asked for a better opening-night date.

Today I fly to San Francisco, where Satchmo is in previews at American Conservatory Theatre. We open there on Wednesday, and I’ll be making several Satchmo-related public appearances between now and then, including a Listening Party appearance tonight at SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium and a live interview on KQED’s Forum on Wednesday morning. I also expect to see several more old friends during my brief stay—and, needless to say, I’ll be relishing the company of Gordon Edelstein and John Douglas Thompson, the director and star of the production. I’ve missed them both very much.

Come Thursday I fly back to Florida and resume “civilian” life with Mrs. T. We’re seeing Asolo Rep’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! in Sarasota on Sunday afternoon, and I’m excited about it. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I’ll be leaving pieces of my heart behind in Chicago and San Francisco.

American Theatre, the magazine for the American professional nonprofit theater, runs a monthly contest in which readers are invited to supply a caption for a cartoon. This is the cartoon used in November’s contest, the winner of which was just announced. Lou Harry’s winning caption read as follows: “We’ll trade you Terry Teachout and Eric Bentley for Shaw.” I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed as hard as I did when I read it. Of course I’m still a drama critic and hope always to be one, but it’s also true that I’ve I become, for better or worse, a full-fledged (if not full-time) playwright and stage director-to-be, which I suspect means that you never feel quite right when you’re not working on a show.

Fortunately, it looks like I’m going to have plenty of additional opportunities to work on Satchmo at the Waldorf. Dramatists Play Service, the publishers of Satchmo, told me last week that my first play now occupies the #10 slot on DPS’ in-house list of its most frequently produced shows. In addition to San Francisco and West Palm Beach, we open in Portsmouth on January 22 and in Colorado Springs on February 18. Beyond that, DPS has approved six productions for the 2016-17 season, with more (we hope) to come.

I never dreamed that any of this would come to pass when I sat down in Winter Park in February of 2010 and wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf. I’d forgotten the coincidence—if that’s what it was—but itso happens that I was starting to write Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington at exactly the same time:

I wanted to get started [on Duke ] right away in order to capitalize on the psychic momentum generated by the events of the past year. A colleague remarked to me at breakfast the other day that 2009 must have been the most eventful year of my professional life to date, and I couldn’t argue with him. The twin successes of Pops and The Letter have left me with an exhilarating sense of possibility, a feeling that I can do anything to which I set my mind.

When you’re feeling that way, it’s a good idea to pinch yourself blue at regular intervals, though life usually gets around to doing that for you sooner or later.

Indeed it does, and I’ve got the bruises to prove it. I wouldn’t have been able to get all the way from there to here without a lot of faith—and a lot of hard work. And yet…it really did happen. So you keep that in mind the next time you feel like saying to yourself, Oh, hell, why bother? It’s never going to happen for me. Probably it won’t, but sometimes it does. And one thing’s for sure: you can’t win if you don’t play.

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Louis Armstrong performs and talks to Ralph J. Gleason on Jazz Casual, originally telecast on San Francisco’s KQED-TV on January 23, 1963:

“Never send off any piece of writing the moment it is finished. Put it aside. Take on something else. Go back to it a month later and re-read it. Examine each sentence and ask ‘Does this say precisely what I mean? Is it capable of misunderstanding? Have I used a cliché where I could have invented a new and therefore asserting and memorable form? Have I repeated myself and wobbled round the point when I could have fixed the whole thing in six rightly chosen words? Am I using words in their basic meaning or in a loose plebeian way?’”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Thomas Merton, August 13, 1948 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway revival of Noises Off. Here’s an excerpt.

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Classic farce—the kind in which doors get slammed at metronomically regular intervals—is hard to write and harder to stage. Not only does it require timing of immaculately finicky exactitude to ensure that the doors slam on time without decapitating anybody, but it works only when the actors conduct themselves with poker-faced seriousness, behaving as though they’re unaware that the audience is convulsed by their humiliating plight. Nothing kills farce faster than aren’t-we-silliness….

For all these reasons, the classic fin-de-siècle farces of Georges Feydeau and their neo-classical progeny, the dark-to-black comedies of Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton and the “translaptations” of David Ives, are scarcely ever seen on Broadway, which favors less comedically challenging fare. But Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” which is widely thought (by me among others) to be the funniest play ever written, give or take Mr. Ives’ “The Liar,” is a happy exception to that gloomy rule. First seen on Broadway in 1983 and revived there in 2001, it is now being done again, this time by the Roundabout Theatre Company in a production directed by Jeremy Herrin, who made his New York debut last season with the transfer of “Wolf Hall.” This revival is as glorious as “Wolf Hall” was dull…

As befits a farce, “Noises Off” is spectacularly complex, consisting as it does of a chaotic rehearsal and two even more chaotic performances of the first act of “Nothing On,” a third-rate British sex comedy that is being mounted (so to speak) by a second-rate touring troupe. It is, to put it academically, a metafarce—a farce about farce—into which Mr. Frayn has inserted a near-literal turn of the dramatic screw whose ingenuity borders on genius: The two-story set is turned around during intermission, thus allowing us to witness the calamitous events from the point of view of the hapless actors and crew….

Most theatrical rehearsals aren’t remotely as lunatic as this, of course. When things do go wrong, though, they can go really, really wrong, and every disaster portrayed in “Noises Off” has actually happened somewhere or other. What makes the play so funny is that all of them, from the first memory lapse to the last life-threatening pratfall, happen in the same show at the same time. It’s Murphy’s Law run amuck. The second act in particular is a whirligig of slapstick choreography for whose pristine execution Mr. Herrin deserves the highest possible marks.

The secret ingredient of his production is that Mr. Herrin has gone to similar lengths to ensure that every member of the cast plays for truth, not laughs—which, of course, makes you laugh twice as hard….

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Read the whole thing here.

Highlights from the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Noises Off:

Leonard Bernstein talks about and leads the London Symphony in a performance of his Second Symphony, “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by W.H. Auden’s book-length poem of the same name. The piano soloist is Krystian Zimerman:

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

The Court Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring Barry Shabaka Henley and directed by Charles Newell, opens tomorrow night in Chicago. After eight public previews, we’ll be as ready as we’re going to be.

As for me, this is my seventh opening night for Satchmo, and I’m just as excited as I was in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, and Beverly Hills. It doesn’t get old.

In preparation for the great moment, I present—as I always do before my opening nights—the following clip, which I first saw on TV as a child and which in recent years has become ever more relevant to my life.

Break a leg, everybody:

“Never believe that afflictions improve character, enlarge the understanding, or teach you charitable thoughts! The man not afflicted, the easy, open fortunate man is the likable man, the kindly man, the considerate man—in short, the man who may have time and inclination to think of someone besides himself. Be virtuous, and you’ll be happy? Nonsense! Be happy and you’ll begin to be virtuous.”

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed