Archives for March 2016

Gwen Verdon sings “I’m a Brass Band,” from Sweet Charity, on The Ed Sullivan Show. The words are by Dorothy Fields and the music is by Cy Coleman. This performance incorporates Bob Fosse’s choreography from the original 1966 Broadway production. It was originally telecast by CBS on October 2, 1966:

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

“As happier men watch birds, I watch men. They are less attractive but more various.”

Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two New York shows, an off-Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses and the Broadway premiere of Bright Star. Here’s an excerpt.

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No playwright has ever made a more spectacularly self-assured debut than George Bernard Shaw, who blasted off the theatrical launching pad in 1892 with “Widowers’ Houses,” a refreshingly unpreachy comedy about the evils of capitalism that ought to be as popular as “Pygmalion.” Instead, it’s mostly forgotten save by Shaw scholars: “Widowers’ Houses” was last performed on Broadway in 1907, and until TACT/The Actors Company Theatre’s new production opened off Broadway, I’d seen it done only once, by Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre eight summers ago. Fortunately, TACT’s revival, directed by David Staller, is a winner, a small-scale staging that’s as full of Shavian sparkle as the play itself.

Shaw ranked “Widowers’ Houses” among his “unpleasant” plays, since it deals with the grim subject of urban poverty. But he knew that the only way to get most people to think about unpleasant things is to make them laugh, and so he concocted a fizzy boulevard comedy à la Oscar Wilde whose anti-hero, Sartorius (Terry Layman), is a rich, self-consciously pompous fellow who is looking to marry off Blanche (Talene Monahon), his difficult daughter, to a well-bred gent in need of a fortune. Enter Harry (Jeremy Beck), a doctor from a suitable family that lives on its income. So what’s the problem? Just this: Sartorius is a notorious slumlord who makes his money by “screwing” rent (Shaw’s word) out of the impoverished occupants of the rundown tenements that he owns….

Brian Prather’s set is simple but suggestive, and the cast has been selected with the greatest of care: Mr. Layman is sumptuously rich-voiced, while Ms. Monahon plays Blanche as a startlingly predatory vampire whose ill-gotten fortune any prudent man would think twice about hunting….

Steve Martin is, among many other things, a good banjo player who writes not-so-great plays. Now he’s branched out by writing a really bad bluegrass-pop musical. In “Bright Star,” directed by Walter Bobbie, Mr. Martin and Edie Brickell, a singer-songwriter with whom he has made two albums, tell the story of a painfully earnest young writer from the hills of North Carolina (A.J. Shively) who comes home from World War II and sells a painfully earnest short story to a prestigious Asheville quarterly edited by an unhappy woman (Carmen Cusack) with a terrible secret—or, rather, a Terrible Secret, this being the kind of show that is constructed exclusively out of upper-case clichés….

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To read my review of Widowers’ Houses, go here.

To read my review of Bright Star, go here.

The trailer for TACT’s Widowers’ Houses:

The TV commercial for Bright Star:

A scene from the American Playhouse TV version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Jack Hofsiss. Tommy Lee Jones plays Brick, Jessica Lange plays Maggie, Kim Stanley plays Big Mama, and Rip Torn plays Big Daddy. The performance was telecast on PBS in 1984:

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

“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry, June 20, 1831

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I take note of the contemporary relevance of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Here’s an excerpt.

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Political novels aren’t what they used to be, no doubt because truth really is stranger than fiction nowadays. But three of the top-selling American political novels of the 20th century, Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah” and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” continue to be read and remembered to this day, doubtless in part because they were all turned into Hollywood movies. Alas, none of those movies was worthy of its source material, not even Robert Rossen’s 1949 film version of “All the King’s Men,” which won a best-picture Oscar. Mediocrity is, of course, the usual fate of good novels that make it to the big screen, but it’s especially disappointing in the case of “All the King’s Men,” which is more relevant today than ever before.

It goes almost without saying that Rossen was lost before he started. No film can convey more than a sliver of the essence of a great novel, and “All the King’s Men,” which was inspired in part by the career of Huey Long, ranks among the greatest. This is all the more remarkable because it is about politics, a subject notorious for turning the brains of artists into mush. Yet there is nothing sentimental about Warren’s portrayal of Willie Stark, a Long-like Louisiana politician who seeks power to do good and is ultimately destroyed by it….

An idealistic young reformer turned ruthless operator, Stark’s life is changed utterly when he comes to the reluctant conclusion that all men, however honorable they may seem to be, are both corrupt and corruptible: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” This leads him to treat any political means, however illegal, as acceptable so long as the end is sufficiently desirable….

Is Stark right to be so pessimistic about what he calls “the nature of things”? If so, does that justify his own increasingly monstrous behavior? Or can noble ends be corrupted by the evil means through which we seek to bring them into being? The fact that Warren deliberately leaves this question open is part of what gives “All the King’s Men” its permanent relevance…

But the reason why “All the King’s Men” is of immediate interest can be found in the scene in which Stark addresses a crowd of poor white farmers who care nothing for politics or politicians, having decided that Louisiana will always be ruled by the rich. His first words fill them with resentment: “Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks.” But then he surprises them: “That’s what you are. And me—I’m one, too. Oh, I’m a red-neck, for the sun has beat down on me. I’m a sucker, for I fell for that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile….nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself. Up there in town they won’t help you. It is up to you and God, and God helps those who help themselves!” By identifying with their feelings of powerlessness and promising to “nail up anybody who stands in your way,” he forges them into a populist alliance that puts him in the governor’s mansion.

Does this perhaps have a familiar ring? If it doesn’t, your TV is broken….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the theatrical re-release 1949 film of All the King’s Men:

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, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Eclipsed (drama, PG-13, Broadway remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 19, original production reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, 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, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for bright children capable of enjoying a love story, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Hold On to Me Darling (drama, PG-13, closes April 17, reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes April 17, then reopens June 17-Oct. 2, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Ah, Wilderness! (comedy, PG-13, closes April 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Prodigal Son (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it,
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.

Lord Byron, Don Juan