Archives for May 13, 2016

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring Barry Shabaka Henley and directed by me, opens tonight in West Palm Beach. With two successful public previews under our belts, I now feel safe in saying that we’re ready to light the candle. In fact, everything went so smoothly at Thursday’s preview performance that I unhesitatingly canceled today’s final rehearsal. Instead we’re all going to stay home and rest up. As my Louis Armstrong says in Satchmo, “Wanna please the people, get you a good night’s sleep.” Afternoon naps don’t hurt, either.

This is, as regular readers of this blog know, my professional debut as a stage director. But it is also, incredible as it may sound, my ninth opening night to date for Satchmo, and I’m just as delighted as I was in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, Beverly Hills, Chicago, and San Francisco—as well as in Santa Fe, Philadelphia, and Louisville, the cities where my three operas opened. It doesn’t get old.

In preparation for the big night, I present—as I always do before my opening nights—the following clip, which I first saw on TV as a child and which in recent years has become increasingly relevant to my life.

Break a leg, everybody:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I file the second of two reports from Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, which is currently presenting Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in rotating repertory. Here’s an excerpt.

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Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre is presenting Tennessee Williams’ best-known play in rotating repertory with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” You may not realize how unusual this is: It is now possible for what is by all accounts the first time to see live performances of the two most influential American plays of the postwar era performed by the same cast on the same stage on the same day. That’s big news, and good news.

Like Vincent M. Lancisi, whose exceptional “Salesman” I reviewed last week, Derek Goldman has given us a production that sticks to the Gospel According to Elia Kazan, whose 1951 film of “Streetcar” was no less closely based on his Broadway staging. The time is 1947, the place a sordid-looking two-room railroad flat in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and the characters are all pretty much as you remember them: Blanche DuBois (Beth Hylton) is a flirty, fluttery southern belle who isn’t as young as she used to be, and Stanley (Danny Gavigan) is a working-class brute to whose physical charms Stella (Megan Anderson), his wife and Blanche’s sister, is in thrall. You’ll know your way, too, around Daniel Ettinger’s set, which recalls the not-quite-realistic tenement that Jo Mielziner conjured up for Kazan….

If you’ve never seen “Streetcar,” you’ll come away from this version knowing exactly what the play is about, and you’ll succumb with dark joy to its musky hot-weather spell—and to the acting of the fine cast….

The strengths of the production outweigh its occasional flaws, as does the fact that it’s running in repertory with “Death of a Salesman.” It’s easy to spot the differences between the two plays, but to see them performed in close succession underscores their commonality: Blanche, like Willy Loman, is the negation of the American dream, a woman who has pursued happiness in the wrong way and must now pay a fearful price for her mistake. The overused phrase “once in a lifetime” rarely stands up to more than casual scrutiny, but this is one of those rarer-than-rare occasions on which it is nothing more than the truth….

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Read the whole thing here.

To read last week’s review of Death of a Salesman, go here.

The theatrical trailer for Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire:

Louis Armstrong and His All Stars record “I Ain’t Got Nobody” in 1959. This sound film, shot at the sessions for Satchmo Plays King Oliver, is the only known footage of Armstrong at work in the recording studio. Its existence was unknown until it was discovered in a storage facility 2012. The other musicians seen in the clip are Peanuts Hucko on clarinet, Trummy Young on trombone, Billy Kyle onpiano, Mort Herbert on bass, and Danny Barcelona on drums:

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

“Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia