Archives for April 2016

“Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself—and, sometimes, doing so—is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.”

Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism”

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the growing progressive backlash against Hamilton. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

The New York Times recently published a piece by Jennifer Schuessler called “’Hamilton’ and History: Are They in Sync?” in which a gaggle of academic historians declared Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-ethnic hip-hop musical about the man on the $10 bill to be politically incorrect. While some of them claimed to like the music, they bristled at the rest of the show, and one dismissed it as “Founders Chic.”

Mr. Miranda, it seems, is too easy on Alexander Hamilton to suit progressive tastes. The Hamilton of “Hamilton” is a flawed but nonetheless incontestably heroic figure, an illegitimate Caribbean-born immigrant whose greatness is insufficiently acknowledged: “Another immigrant, comin’ up from the bottom/His enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him.” But to left-wing scholars, the real Hamilton was an elitist who, in the words of Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, was “more a man for the 1% than the 99%,” and for Mr. Miranda to have portrayed him as “an up-from-under hero seems dissonant amidst the politics of 2016.”

I’ve been waiting for just such a reaction to “Hamilton” ever since it opened last year. Why? Because, as I wrote in my review of the original off-Broadway production, the show “is at bottom as optimistic about America as ‘1776.’ American exceptionalism meets hip-hop: That’s ‘Hamilton.’” Whether Mr. Miranda knew it or not—and he surely does now—such a point of view is by definition anathema to those who see America as a country so tainted with the original sin of class privilege as to be irredeemable….

For my part, I think “Hamilton” is best understood as an exercise in historical myth-making, the same kind of thing that John Ford was doing when he made such films as “My Darling Clementine,” “They Were Expendable” and “Young Mr. Lincoln.” Ford’s purpose was to pass American history through the prism of popular art, in the process creating semi-fictional American heroes whose stirring lives would inspire young viewers to do great deeds of their own. Of course he knew perfectly well that his cinematic tales of historical derring-do were far from literally true, but he also understood the pivotal role played by idealism in the formation of character. That’s what the newspaper editor in Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” meant when he told Jimmy Stewart’s character, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And that’s what Mr. Miranda has done in “Hamilton”: He’s created a modern-day legend of his very own…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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, 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, 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, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closing Jan. 1, 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)
• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for bright children capable of enjoying a love story, some performances sold out last week, closes July 10, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• Mary Page Marlowe (drama, PG-13, closes May 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Stupid Fu**ing Bird (serious comedy, PG-13, contains nudity, closes May 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Arcadia (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN COLUMBIA, MARYLAND:
• Hunting and Gathering (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa”

Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys perform “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” originally telecast on The Flatt & Scruggs Grand Ole Opry Show in December of 1962:

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

“I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.”

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Like everyone else who pays the slightest attention to theater in America, I was neither surprised nor displeased that this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama went to Hamilton, about whose overwhelming excellence I have long been on record. I do, however, want to offer a cultural footnote to yesterday’s announcement, one that says something revealing about how journalism works in the age of the social media.

I flew up from Orlando to New York on Monday morning after a lousy night’s sleep, and I fell into bed as soon as I got home for a much-needed nap. I checked Twitter as soon as I woke up to see what was going on, and found my feed full of Pulitzer-related tweets. One of them was a public message from CBS Radio News that read as follows: “Hi Terry. We would love to speak with you, if you have a moment. Please give us a call. Thank you!‬” A phone number followed, which surprised me. (I wonder how many people called it while I was still napping.)

For an instant I suspected you-have-won-one-million-dollars phishery, but the tweet didn’t look phony, and it occurred to me that since my Wall Street Journal reviews of Hamilton had been cited in the show’s publicity, a network producer might be calling to get a quote about the Pulitzer. So I called CBS and was immediately connected to someone who asked if I’d agree to be interviewed about the show for two minutes. “I can say what I have to say in ten seconds,” I replied.

Within a minute I heard a click on the line, and an unseen correspondent to whom I was never introduced asked, “What do you think of the Pulitzer going to Hamilton?” Sleepy though I still was, I opened my mouth and started talking, and for once in my life, the right words came out unhesitatingly: “Sometimes the obvious choice is also the right choice.” And that was that.

You will note that:

• I reflexively went to Twitter, not to any news-related site, to find out what was going on in the world.

• In order to get in touch with me, CBS Radio posted a public message on Twitter instead of trying to reach me by phone (a good thing, too, since I pulled the plug on my landline a decade ago and became a cellphone-only user).

• All this worked perfectly.

I’ve been tweeting since January of 2009. Strange to think that a technology that was close to brand-new seven years ago is now so much a part of my personal and professional existence that I take its existence for granted. Such, I guess, is life under the aspect of postmodernity.

From 2006:

“I didn’t realize how long it has been since I set out to acquire a brand new skill—hell, in graduate school I think I unlearned a fair number of them—and at this point, anyway, the learning curve is nice and steep. Every week I learn to do something new and get demonstrably better at everything I learned previously. Progress is better than steady, and skating just keeps getting more fun as I test and stretch my limits….”

Read the whole thing here.