Archives for February 2016

After living out of suitcases for the past two months, Mrs. T and I said farewell to Florida, returned at long last to our Manhattan apartment on Saturday night, and fell into bed with abject gratitude.

It isn’t that we regretted so much as an hour of our time on the road. (O.K., we both regretted each and every second of the time we spent sitting in airports, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) Not only do we both love the Sunshine State, but we saw and heard many wonderful things there, including a stirring rehearsal of Rossini’s Stabat Mater by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, which will be premiering my latest collaboration with Paul Moravec, a choral ode to music, in April. We also went to several exceptionally fine shows, foremost among them a letter-perfect revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Palm Beach Dramaworks, where I’ll be directing Satchmo at the Waldorf in May (that’s why I didn’t review it in The Wall Street Journal).

In addition, I flew up to Chicago and San Francisco in January to open new productions of Satchmo, both of which were successful far beyond my wildest expectations, and I wrote the first draft of a brand-new play, about which—perhaps—much more in due course.

To be sure, we didn’t spend the whole of our time in Florida immersed in the world of art. The sun shone on us with fair frequency, and while it wasn’t as warm as we would have liked, it was usually pleasant enough for us to look at, walk by, and (on occasion) swim in the sea. That beats twenty-below-zero weather all hollow.

Even so, there comes a point in the life of even the most indefatigable of travelers when he wants above all things to sleep in his own bed, and so we were more than ready to be back in New York by the time we finally got there. Cold or not, it’s where we belong.

I’d previously arranged a welcome-home surprise for Mrs. T, and for once I was able to keep my trap shut and let her be surprised by it. On one of my flying visits to New York in January, I bought, framed, and hung on the wall of our living room a new addition to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph called “Sunrise” that was made in 1974 by my beloved Fairfield Porter. It’s a piece I’ve longed to own ever since I first saw it, and I suspected that Mrs. T would love it as well, since it portrays a brilliant sunrise over the Atlantic. I had a feeling that it would give her special pleasure on gray days when she’d rather be sitting by the Gulf of Mexico, and I guessed right. “I love it!” she cried when we opened the front door of our apartment last night.

We slept in on Sunday, then went down to Lincoln Center for the last performance of New York City Ballet’s winter season. The program consisted of three of George Balanchine’s modernist masterpieces, Agon, Episodes, and The Four Temperaments, all of which were new to Mrs. T and all of which I love passionately. In fact, I think The Four Temperaments is the greatest dance ever made.

As I wrote in this space three years ago:

I love what Jerome Robbins said about the coda of The Four Temperaments: “At the end, where there are those great soaring lifts, I always feel as if I am watching some momentous departure—like interplanetary travellers taking their leave of the world.” This is what I wrote about the same moment in All in the Dances, my Balanchine biography: “To me, it is as if I have beheld the working out of a fearsomely complex equation whose triumphant solution causes the universe to explode into being.”

If seeing a ballet can change your life, then The Four Temperaments changed mine. In the fall of 1987 I saw a PBS documentary about Balanchine that contained excerpts from several of his ballets, including a lengthy sequence from “Melancholic,” the second section of The Four Temperaments. I was so fascinated by it—as I had already been fascinated by what Arlene Croce wrote about Balanchine in her New Yorker dance reviews—that I resolved to see for myself what his works looked like in the theater.

What followed was an instantaneous conversion: I bought a cheap seat for a New York City Ballet performance a few weeks later, and before the year was out, I was hanging out with dance critics and writing about dance for the late, lamented New Dance Review. Who would have thought that seventeen years later, I would write a Balanchine biography? Life is full of unimaginable surprises.

So it is—though it was no surprise to me that Mrs. T was thrilled by The Four Ts. I’ve taken a dozen people to see it for the first time, and they’ve all responded to it with the same mixture of astonishment and ecstasy. What better way, then, to celebrate our return by seeing a masterpiece that was made in New York seventy years ago? As endlessly trying as life here can be, there’s still nowhere quite like it.

For me, of course, my adopted home town is first and foremost a paradise of art, the great good place where Balanchine and Porter lived and worked and the city that did much to make me what I am today. That above all is the reason why I continue to live here, and why I expect to do so for some time to come. No matter what the future may hold in store for us, Mrs. T and I will never cease to think of New York with love.

Pat Metheny plays “And I Love Her,” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney:

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

“The guitar for me is a translation device. It’s not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn’t a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination—a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.”

Pat Metheny (quoted in Ben Ratliff, “Pat Metheny: An Idealist Reconnects With His Mentors,” New York Times, February 25, 2005)

“‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on Forest Whitaker’s Broadway debut, in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie, which also stars Frank Wood. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

What happens when a screen star gets a hankering to make his Broadway debut in a demanding play? Disaster, usually. While it’s possible for a film actor with little or no stage experience to make his debut on Broadway or in London’s West End without embarrassing himself, he’s betting against the house. To be sure, Daniel Radcliffe held his own in “Equus” and Claire Danes hit a bases-loaded home run in “Pygmalion,” but there are any number of grisly examples to the contrary. (Two words: Katie Holmes.) I’m sorry to say that Forest Whitaker has failed to beat the odds in Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie.”

A two-man play about a small-time gambler that was written in 1942 but not performed until 1964, “Hughie” was first acted on Broadway by Jason Robards. It’s been done twice more on Broadway since then, by Ben Gazzara in 1975 and Al Pacino in 1996, and has also been famously acted elsewhere by Brian Dennehy and Burgess Meredith. You don’t have to look far to find the reasons for its popularity. It’s an hour-long near-monologue (the supporting actor speaks a total of 391 words) performed on the plainest of sets. Not only is it cheap to mount, but it is, when done well, an incomparable showcase for a great stage actor….

All of which brings us back to Mr. Whitaker, who is the much-admired star of such widely varied films as “Bird,” “The Butler,” “The Crying Game,” “Good Morning, Vietnam” and “The Last King of Scotland.” He doesn’t seem to have done any stage roles of consequence, though, and therein lies the heart of the matter: Talented though he is, Mr. Whitaker is a film actor through and through, a pure naturalist accustomed to being seen by the camera rather than presenting himself to a live audience, and his bright, bouncy performance is as devoid of depth as his piping tenor voice. You half expect him to break into a chorus of “Luck Be a Lady” when he makes his first entrance….

Mr. Wood, whose performances in “Side Man” and the 2010 off-Broadway revival of “Angels in America” (in which he played Roy Cohn) showed him to be one of our most gifted stage actors, is infinitely better equipped to keep up his end of the deal. He sits stoically behind the front desk, looking less like a human being than a not-quite-animated cadaver, letting Erie’s snappy patter wash up pointlessly against his own torpid indifference. Every word he utters stinks of hopelessness. Mr. Whitaker, by contrast, scarcely ever manages to hint at anything beyond what we see and hear….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Al Pacino talks about Hughie:

Joan Baez sings Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe” on the BBC’s In Concert in 1965:

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

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss a problem that has become an epidemic in the world of American theater—cellphone abuse—and offer a solution. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Yes, cellphone abuse has reached pestilential proportions, but everybody in the profession privately admits that existing announcements, be they clever or straightforward, do next to nothing to reduce it. Why? Because the announcements aren’t made in such a way as to seize the attention of playgoers and persuade them to change their ways. Instead, they’re either cutesy-pie or pro forma, both of which signal that they needn’t be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, Patti LuPone’s widely reported in-your-face technique of shaming errant cellphone users by singling them out from the stage doesn’t seem to work any better. That doesn’t surprise me. Instead of insulting them, the trick is to get their attention—and get them on your side.

The only truly effective cellphone announcement I’ve ever heard was was made during the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 2009 revival of “American Buffalo,” a play by the famously foul-mouthed David Mamet. Before each performance, an unseen announcer shouted, “TURN OFF YOUR F—— PHONES!!!”

It worked, too.

Short of that, here’s what I’d do….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A curtain speech by Patti LuPone, made after a 2015 Lincoln Center Theater performance of Shows for Days: