Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“We feel first; and then with the advice and consent of whatever the feeling is, we think or think we think. I say think we think because I can’t but observe the thinking’s seldom more than an inventing of arguments in favor of the feeling.”
James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed
On Sunday I flew up to Chicago to see back-to-back preview performances of the Court Theatre’s all-new production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, directed by Charles Newell, which opens on Saturday. By then I’d seen several dozen performances of Satchmo’s previous iteration, the off-Broadway production directed by Gordon Edelstein that has also been mounted in Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles and will be opening next Wednesday at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. It’d be hard to come up with two more dissimilar ways of staging the same show.
Gordon’s Satchmo, whose set was designed by Lee Savage, is for the most part naturalistic in approach. It takes place in a dressing room that is specifically intended to suggest a room at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in whose Empire Room Louis Armstrong played his last gig in March of 1971, four months before his death. As part of his preparation for designing the set, Lee studied period photographs of the Waldorf, and he made every possible effort to create a performing space that has “Waldorf ” written all over it, right down to the tiniest of details. Armstrong’s dressing-room table is strewn with objects closely similar to the ones that can be seen in surviving photographs of his real-life dressing rooms and hotel rooms, and John Gromada, the sound designer, accompanied the production with a well-chosen selection of excerpts from Armstrong’s recordings. The goal was to make Satchmo look and sound as realistic as possible, and I think we succeeded. The sink even works!
In a sense, Gordon’s straightforward, no-nonsense staging emanated from the design. Needless to say, the audience has to make a huge imaginative leap in order to “buy” the theatrical conceit of the play, in which a single actor switches back and forth without warning between Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis. But Lee’s set and Kevin Adams’ lighting plot underline every character change, and to date our audiences seem not to have any trouble keeping up with the action.
Charlie’s production of Satchmo, whose set was designed by John Culbert, is as expressionistic as Gordon’s production is naturalistic. It takes place on an elevated, all-but-bare playing area that is surrounded on all four sides by footlights. A huge upstage mirror is carefully positioned to reflect the onstage action in a way that is visible to everyone in the audience. Keith Parham’s sharp-angled lighting is unabashedly theatrical—his use of shadows is straight out of film noir—and Andre Pluess, the sound designer, has accompanied the show with a thickly layered mix of recordings by Armstrong, electronic music, and sound effects, some of them realistic and others almost hallucinatory. In a sense, the sound is the scenery: it hints at where we are and what is happening there.
Do I prefer one version over the other? No. Both productions seem to me to be completely and equally valid, each in its own way. I wouldn’t want to have choose between them—and I don’t have to choose. As soon as we open Charlie’s Satchmo in Chicago, I’ll fly out to San Francisco to open Gordon’s Satchmo. I’m thrilled at the prospect of the juxtaposition.
To be sure, my personal taste runs more to the poetic abstraction of lyric theater, and Charlie’s Satchmo is poetic—and beautiful—beyond anything I could possibly have imagined. But I also adore smell-the-coffee kitchen-sink realism when it’s done well, and Gordon and his design team did it really, really well. As my Louis Armstrong says when describing the introductory trumpet cadenza of “West End Blues,” by the time you get to the end of their version of the show, “you know you done been somewhere.”
All this is of particular relevance to me because I’ll be directing my own production of Satchmo at Palm Beach Dramaworks later this year. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Michael Amico, the set designer, about how we want our Satchmo to look, and he e-mailed me his first preliminary sketch of the set on Saturday. Our plan at present is to split the difference, so to speak, between Gordon and Charlie: the Palm Beach Satchmo will be naturalistic, but in a looser, less historically specific way.
And how well will that work? Your guess is as good as mine. But I do know that whatever its ultimate value as a play, Satchmo at the Waldorf has so far proved strong enough to have inspired two full-scale productions that are radically different in appearance and approach, as well as a small-scale version, the 2011 Orlando premiere, that was directed by Rus Blackwell and designed by William Elliot. Staged in a tiny cabaret-style black-box theater, the first Satchmo presented the show in a much more intimate (but similarly convincing) manner.
Am I a good enough director to find a fourth, comparably persuasive way to thread the needle? We’ll see. The mere fact that I wrote the play, though, is no guarantee that I have anything original to say about it as a director, nor do I think that my interpretation of Satchmo must necessarily be “right.” The author doesn’t always know best! So when I go down to Palm Beach to stage the show, I intend to approach the script as if it had been written by another person. Insofar as possible, I want to try to see it fresh.
Between them, Gordon, Charlie, Rus, and their respective design teams have now taught me a vast amount about unearthing the directorial possibilities in a play. The rest is up to Michael and me.
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Hearst Metrotone News’ Louis Armstrong obituary, released in 1971. This featurette contains what is thought to be the only surviving film footage shot at Armstrong’s last gig at the Waldorf-Astoria, as well as scenes from his funeral in New York, at which Peggy Lee sang “The Lord’s Prayer.” The eulogy was delivered by Fred Robbins:
The final dress rehearsal for the first preview of the Court Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf took place in Chicago last Thursday night…and I wasn’t there. I was in Florida, reviewing another show. Granted, I flew up three days later, but it still felt strange to be somewhere else on Thursday. I was, after all, intimately involved in the rehearsal process for all six of the show’s previous productions, and I spent two very intense weeks working on Satchmo in Chicago last month.
From here on out, though, my presence will be strictly optional. I’m flying to San Francisco next Monday to open American Conservatory Theatre’s staging of Satchmo, but that one is a straight remounting of the 2014 off-Broadway version. I don’t need to help with rehearsals: I’ll be there strictly to publicize the production, and when it transfers to Colorado Springs in February, I won’t be going with it. Indeed, I won’t even be seeing Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s all-new production, which opens in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on January 22. All I’ll get to do is read about it.
Why am I not traveling to Colorado Springs and Portsmouth to see Satchmo? Because I have a day job, one that requires me to see shows in New York and all over the country, then review them each Friday in The Wall Street Journal. I was able to take two full weeks off to rehearse in Chicago solely because of the peculiarities of the 2015 calendar (the Journal doesn’t publish on Christmas or New Year’s Day, both of which fell on a Friday this past year). In order to shoehorn the Chicago and San Francisco productions into my calendar while simultaneously covering Broadway openings in January, I’ll have to spend the next couple of weeks doing an inordinate amount of cross-country flying. After that, though, it’s back to business.
Fortunately for me, I love the “business” of being a drama critic, so none of this is to be construed as a complaint. Nor do I care to be away from Mrs. T for longer than absolutely necessary, much less to stash her on the Gulf of Mexico for eleven days while I bounce around the colder parts of America.
The real problem, I think, is that I can’t quite grasp that Satchmo has—and, I hope, will continue to have—a life without me. Yes, I did my best to be helpful to Charlie Newell and Barry Shabaka Henley, the director and star of the Court Theater’s production of Satchmo, but I know that the Court could have produced the show perfectly well had I stayed home. Once we opened in New York in 2014 and I signed off on the published version of the text, my job was done. For better or worse, Satchmo at the Waldorf is now on its own.
The truth is that I went to Chicago mostly to watch Charlie work. As regular readers of this space know, I’m staging my own production of Satchmo at the Waldorf in West Palm Beach later this year. It’ll be my professional directing debut, and the more I learn about the process before waltzing into the rehearsal hall in April, the more smoothly things will go. I can’t think of a better way to learn than to watch Charlie, just as I watched Rus Blackwell and Gordon Edelstein when Satchmo was first produced in Orlando and Lenox.
I won’t deny, though, that I also went to Chicago just for the fun of it. My three operatic collaborations with Paul Moravec taught me that there are few things in the world more purely pleasurable than rehearsing a show, and having finally gotten around to writing a play on the eve of my late middle age, I’m well aware that I won’t get anything remotely approaching an unlimited number of opportunities to repeat the experience. That being the case, I figure I’d better squeeze all the juice I can out of this one. Nobody has to tell me that the clock is running.
So I’m flying from Chicago to New York on Wednesday, from New York to Chicago on Thursday, from Chicago to San Francisco next Monday, and from San Francisco back to Sanibel Island next Thursday. That part won’t be even slightly fun—but what happens in between will be worth it.
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Barry Shabaka Henley, the star of the Court Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, talks about his belated discovery of Louis Armstrong:
Fats Domino sings “Ain’t That a Shame” in Shake, Rattle & Rock!, a 1956 film directed by Edward L. Cahn:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)
“The Arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self.”
Francis Bacon, “On Love”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a show in Fort Myers, Florida Repertory Theatre’s revival of A.R. Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour. Here’s an excerpt.
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If A.R. Gurney had been born in 1900 instead of 1930, all of his major plays would have had long runs on Broadway and he would now be universally acknowledged as one of America’s leading playwrights. But his penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat came along a couple of generations too late to catch the wave of changing theatrical taste, and so he has never had a Broadway hit. Instead, his plays are regularly staged off Broadway and by smart regional companies from coast to coast. Be that as it may, Mr. Gurney is still one of the very best playwrights that we have, and “The Cocktail Hour,” which ranks among his finest efforts, is now being performed by Florida Repertory Theatre, one of the top regional troupes in the U.S. If all that sounds to you like a recipe for success, you’re not wrong: Florida Rep’s production, directed by Chris Clavelli, is the most satisfying staging of “The Cocktail Hour” I’ve ever seen.
First performed in 1988, “The Cocktail Hour” is a more-or-less autobiographical comedy about John (Brendan Powers), a youngish playwright who comes home to Buffalo, the city where he (and Mr. Gurney) grew up, with a surprise up his sleeve for his priggish parents: His new play is all about them. The title? “The Cocktail Hour,” naturally—and it’s not a wholly affectionate portrait, either….
Ann (Carrie Lund), John’s mother, has the best line, a two-way zinger aimed at drama critics who don’t get what her son is up to when he puts WASPs on stage: “They don’t like us, John. They resent us. They think we’re all Republicans, all superficial and all alcoholics. Only the latter is true.” But “The Cocktail Hour” contains plenty of other laughs, more than enough to briefly throw the audience off the trail of Mr. Gurney’s intentions. For this is a serious comedy about a family whose members are at odds with one another but are too nice to admit it…
I last saw “The Cocktail Hour” performed by Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in an 890-seat theater whose Broadway-sized stage was a couple of sizes too big for the show. Fort Myers’ 393-seat Arcade Theatre, by contrast, is just right, both for the play itself and for the staging. Mr. Clavelli, a longtime member of Florida Rep’s semi-permanent ensemble, is as adept a director as he is an actor…
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Read the whole thing here.
A.R. Gurney talks about The Cocktail Hour in an interview conducted in 2000 at his New York home:
I wrote a piece about Harold Arlen for the latest issue of the Weekly Standard:
In one sense Arlen’s credits are lackluster. None of his Broadway shows has ever been successfully revived, and except for The Wizard of Oz, the films on which he worked were, for the most part, unmemorable. And while he was also a highly accomplished singer who recorded a fair number of his finest songs—no one ever sang “Ill Wind” better—the timbre of his plaintive, throaty tenor voice was not quite distinctive enough to bring him the kind of mass popularity that [Hoagy] Carmichael and [Johnny] Mercer had during their salad days.
But…the songs! To catalogue them is to be reminded of what made the golden age of American popular song golden, and to be struck by how many of them were performed and recorded to indelible effect by the very best pop and jazz singers of the 20th century. Think, just for openers, of Fred Astaire’s “My Shining Hour,” Ray Charles’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” Nat Cole’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” Bing Crosby’s “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” Judy Garland’s “The Man That Got Away,” Lena Horne’s “Stormy Weather,” Peggy Lee’s “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road),” and Mel Tormé’s “When the Sun Comes Out.” Of such records is an era made….
Read the whole thing here.
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Harold Arlen plays and sings his songs on a 1954 episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour, assisted by Eddie Cantor, Connie Russell, and Frank Sinatra:
Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, featuring Lani Hall on lead vocals, perform “Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Arrastão” on The Hollywood Palace on December 12, 1967. They are introduced by Herb Alpert:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)