Archives for January 2016

If you live in Chicagoland, you can hear me on the radio Friday morning. I’ll be talking about the Court Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, on WBEZ’s The Morning Shift. Barry Shabaka Henley, the star, will also be interviewed. The program airs live from nine a.m. to ten a.m. CST. (I think our segment runs from 9:40 to 9:55, but we may start talking a bit earlier than that.)

Tune to 91.5 FM to listen live on terrestrial radio in the Chicago area. If you live elsewhere in the world, go here to listen via streaming audio on your computer or download a podcast of the show later in the day.

UPDATE: You can listen to the broadcast on line by going here.

Starting today, my Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column will appear in the paper every other Thursday. This week I pay tribute to Cy Walter, the greatest cocktail pianist who ever lived. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s the grossest of understatements to say that cocktail pianists get no respect. They spend most of their lives playing for people who aren’t listening, a not-insignificant number of whom are either drunk or en route to being so. And while I never actually heard anyone ask for “Melancholy Baby” in the long-ago days when I gigged in bars, it’s usually safe to assume that when somebody does have a request, it’ll be for something you’ve played an octillion times. On the other hand, it’s also true that most cocktail pianists aren’t worth listening to, at least not very closely. Sometimes they’re just going through the motions (and who shall blame them?) and sometimes they simply aren’t very good. But a few such folk are true artists, and one of them, Cy Walter, was a very great one, among the finest popular pianists of the 20th century.

Walter, who died in 1968, spent most of his career playing in classy hotel lounges for Manhattanites who got dressed up to do their drinking. He was closely identified with the Drake Room of the now-defunct Drake Hotel, where he performed off and on from 1945 until his death and where his listeners included the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Noël Coward, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins and Tennessee Williams. From 1945 to 1953 he was also a fixture on network radio, performing weekly on a series called “Piano Playhouse.” But his celebrity, such as it was, dried up when he died: Walter’s albums went out of print shortly thereafter, and from then on his name was known only to connoisseurs.

Mark Walter, Cy’s son, is trying to change all that. He started by launching an uncommonly well-stocked website that is the online equivalent of a primary-source biography of his father. Now he’s commemorated the centennial of Cy Walter’s birth by co-producing a pair of compact discs called “Sublimities” (both of which can be ordered from Amazon) that contain a total of 52 tracks by his father. Some are long-unavailable commercial recordings, others radio airchecks that have never before been released. On them Walter can be heard playing piano solos and duets (he frequently performed with Stan Freeman, a pianist of similar talent and stylistic inclination) and accompanying such singers as Marlene Dietrich, Mabel Mercer and Frank Sinatra. Most of the tunes are blue-chip standards, with a few original compositions by Walter thrown in for good measure. All are performed with a consummate elegance and technical wizardry that make you wonder how the man who recorded them could possibly have fallen into obscurity….

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Read the whole thing here.

To order Sublimities, go here and here.

Cy Walter plays “Dancing in the Dark,” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, recorded in 1941:

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)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, nearly all 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, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, 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)

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 IN FORT MYERS, FLA:
• The Cocktail Hour (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• China Doll (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Spring Awakening (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 24, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

“My final reflection, I’m afraid, was that if hypocrisy can be said to be the homage vice pays to virtue, theology could be said to be a homage nonsense tries to pay to sense.”

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

On Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in the auditorium of Chicago’s Court Theatre, watching Charlie Newell reblock the final scene of his production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens there on Saturday. Midway through the scene I received an e-mail from Eric Gibson, my editor at The Wall Street Journal. He informed me that “Sightings,” my biweekly Journal column about the arts, was being moved from Fridays to Thursdays, effective immediately, and asked me to stand by to read and approve the copyedited version of this week’s column, which would be arriving shortly via e-mail.

Two minutes later my cellphone rang. It was Gordon Edelstein, who is in San Francisco remounting his production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens next Wednesday at American Conservatory Theater. He and John Douglas Thompson wanted to know if they could change two words in the script.

As Gordon was reading the proposed change to me over the phone, I received a second e-mail from the Journal, this one containing my copyedited column. I started going through it as I listened to Gordon. Then, a minute or so later, I realized that someone in the auditorium was talking to me. It was Charlie, asking what I thought of a new music cue that he was trying out.

What about today? Well, I got up at five in the morning and went to Midway Airport. By the time you read these words, I’ll be somewhere between Chicago and New York, where a car will meet me at LaGuardia Airport and take me to the American Airlines Theatre to see a press preview of Noises Off. After the show I’ll go home and open my mail, then return to Broadway, where I’ll see a second press preview at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, this one of Our Mother’s Brief Affair, Richard Greenberg’s new play. I’ll have dinner with a friend after the show, then go back home, write my review of Noises Off for Friday’s Journal, and fall into bed.

On Thursday morning I’ll get up at six, send in my Noises Off review, go to LaGuardia, and fly back to Midway, where a waiting car will drive me directly to the Court Theatre to attend the final rehearsal of Satchmo, which should be getting underway shortly after I arrive.

Yes, I know, I asked for it—but maybe not quite so much of it, and definitely not all at once.

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W.C. Fields performs his vaudeville juggling act in The Old Fashioned Way, directed by William Beaudine and released in 1934:

Edward R. Murrow interviews Ethel Waters in her Queens apartment on Person to Person. This program was originally telecast on CBS on January 8, 1954:

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

“‘I think he’s had a bad scare; and I’ve heard that’s the beginning of wisdom.’”

“‘No,’ Noah Tuttle said. ‘When someone’s scared’s when you really can’t trust him.”

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

From 2006:

Believe it or not, I don’t live in the past. No working journalist does, especially one with so many young friends. Even so, I do enjoy rummaging around in my well-stocked memory, and I don’t mind admitting that there are times when I prefer communing with the increasingly distant past to grappling with the uncomfortably proximate present. Ben Gazzara, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Robert Warshow, even Jerry Lewis: today they all seem far more real to me than the pretty people I’d be reading about in Entertainment Weekly if I read Entertainment Weekly. No doubt this has something to do with my recent brush with mortality. To borrow a line from Patrick O’Brian, I’ve been a bar or two behind ever since I got out of the hospital, and though I’m sure I’ll catch up sooner or later, I find it oddly pleasant to linger among ghosts….

Read the whole thing here.