Archives for June 2016

“Genius is unquestionably a great trial, when it takes the romantic form, and genius and romance are so associated in the public mind that many people recognize no other kind. There are other forms of genius, of course, and though they create their own problems, they are not ‘impossible’ people. But O, how deeply we should thank God for these impossible people like Berlioz and Dylan Thomas! What a weary, grey, well-ordered, polite, unendurable hell this would be without them!”

Robertson Davies, “Dylan Thomas and Hector Berlioz”

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I pay tribute to the late Peter Shaffer. Here’s an excerpt.

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The obituaries for Peter Shaffer, who died the other day at the age of 90 and for whom Broadway is dimming its lights on Thursday, were respectful but not effusive. The respect makes sense, since he wrote, among other things, “Amadeus” and “Equus,” two of the most successful plays of the postwar era. The conspicuous lack of wholehearted enthusiasm, however, also makes sense, since Mr. Shaffer, for all his success, wasn’t anybody’s favorite playwright, nor is his work frequently seen in this country nowadays….

Why has Mr. Shaffer faded from the scene? The main reason is undoubtedly that most of his best-known plays, which were written for England’s state-subsidized theaters, were large-scale works whose big casts (“Amadeus” and “Equus” both require 15 actors) put them out of reach of most American companies. At the same time, though, I get the impression that Mr. Shaffer is regarded by many drama critics as a middlebrow, a purveyor of high-minded, impeccably effective plays in which he watered down challenging subjects to make them palatable to the masses. A poor man’s Tom Stoppard, you might say.

It may be that there’s something to that indictment, though it certainly fails to do justice to “Amadeus,” which has long struck me, both in its original 1979 stage version and in Miloš Forman’s justly successful 1984 screen adaptation, as an immensely potent parable of the terrible mystery of human inequality. As for “Equus,” in which Mr. Shaffer took the tale of a stableboy who blinds horses for no apparent reason and turned it into a gripping study of middle-class emotional inhibition, it’s a bit creakier, but the 2008 revival proved that it still packs a walloping theatrical punch when staged with skill and conviction.

More to the point, though, is that Mr. Shaffer’s plays, whether you like them or not, were both genuinely serious and hugely successful….

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Read the whole thing here.

Paul Scofield in a scene from the original production of Amadeus, directed by Peter Hall and filmed at London’s National Theatre:

F. Murray Abraham in the same scene from Miloš Forman’s film version of Amadeus, adapted for the screen by Peter Shaffer:

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)
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 31, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, some 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)
• Matilda (musical, G, closing Jan. 1, most performances sold out last week, 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, nearly all 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)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 2, original production reviewed here)

IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, two different stagings of the same play performed by the same cast in rotating repertory, closes July 10, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN TYSON, VA.:
• Floyd Collins (musical, G, too emotionally intense for children, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN HOUSTON:
• Saint Joan (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, original production reviewed here)

“I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

The Wall Street Journal has given me a second drama column this week in which to review the Public Theater’s Central Park production of The Taming of the Shrew. Here’s an excerpt.

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“The Taming of the Shrew,” like “The Mikado,” is one of those theatrical masterpieces that have been rendered all but unperformable by the rise of militant political correctness. It’s been six years since I last reviewed a “Shrew,” and the only reason why this one, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, was deemed suitable for performance in Central Park by the Public Theater is that it’s being performed by an all-female cast. The problem with this production, however, isn’t that it’s politicized—it’s that it’s not very funny. Boisterous and good-humored, yes, but “The Taming of the Shrew” is a comedy or nothing, and I’ve never seen a staging that made me laugh less.

The culprit is presumably Ms. Lloyd, who is most familiar to American audiences as the director of “The Iron Lady” and the film version of “Mamma Mia!” but is known in her native England as a stage director of distinction. Be that as it may, there isn’t much in her resumé to suggest that comedy is her forte, and little in this production to contradict that impression. While it’s full of baggy-pants slapstick, the timing of the gags is loose, unsure and short on the head-turning, split-second snap of surprise without which such antics invariably come off as noisy rather than funny.

Similarly bothersome is the conceptual vagueness of the production, whose setting is, or appears to be, a seedy big-top tent. No sooner do you enter the outdoor theater than you see Mark Thompson’s set and think, “Oh, I get it—a ‘Shrew’ set in a circus! Petruchio will be…a lion tamer!” But then the play gets under way with a beauty-pageant talent contest, followed by a series of equally over-obvious visual non sequiturs (Petruchio and Kate spend their honeymoon in an motor home whose exterior is festooned with Vargas-type pin-up girls and whose license plate reads PISA-ASS) that fail to add up to anything in particular….

Could it be that the in-your-face feminism of Ms. Lloyd’s staging, in which Petruchio (Janet McTeer) makes “his” entrance toting an outsized pair of pink handcuffs, is somehow getting in the way of the laughs? I can’t see it. There’s nothing intrinsically unfunny, after all, about a “Shrew” whose modus operandi is to have women in drag exaggerate stereotypical male behavior. The best musical revival of 2015, Jessica Stone’s Two River Theater production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” was an all-male version whose casting deliberately inverted the show’s dumb-blonde stereotypes to bold comic effect….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Taming of the Shrew:

A rare kinescope of Woody Allen doing his standup routine on British TV in 1965:

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

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

A fast-growing number of the magazines and newspapers that I read on line are now imposing rigid limits on free articles-per-month for non-subscribers. I know why they do it, and I couldn’t sympathize more. Even so, my guess is that most Americans respond to those limits by ceasing to read the publications that impose them—and given the vast amount of other good stuff to read that’s out there on the web, I can’t help but wonder about the future of journalism, mainstream and otherwise, in a country where fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for it.

At the same time, though, I also find myself thinking that what once was a full-scale culture-wide “conversation” is now increasingly back-porch gossip in gated media communities. A country in which everybody self-selects whom to listen to is a country in which most people only hear what they want—and expect—to hear.

It strikes me that this constitutes a permanent change in American culture, and a highly significant one. It’s yet another unintended consequence of the demographic phenomenon known as “the big sort,” in which like-minded, similarly situated Americans increasingly prefer to live among their own kind, and are willing to move elsewhere in order to do so.

The British playwright David Hare, who is a socialist, said something quite striking in The Blue Touch Paper, his recently published memoir, about the character of Manhattan in the Sixties. He called it

a nineteenth-century city which took its character from the fact that the working class and the immigrants still lived in the middle of it. You could move around, eat in cheap places, stay in cheap hostels, go to cheap shows, because there were lots of people who lived in Manhattan who were far worse off than you were. It wasn’t just the famous racial mix, it was much more a mix of fortune which made life livable at the bottom, if never as luxurious as it was at the top.

But there were more places than Manhattan to which this description applied—and there was more to it than money. Many, perhaps most Americans of my generation (I was born in 1956) lived in places whose residents included people who read, liked, listened to, and thought all sorts of things, and who voted differently, even unpredictably, on election day. As a result, we learned to get along with one another, and sometimes we even learned from one another. At the very least, we learned—up to a point—to be reasonably tolerant of each other’s crotchets.

More and more, though, we don’t live together and we don’t listen to each other. As a result, the modest but real tolerance of the past is increasingly giving way to attempts at outright repression, or (more often, at least for now) the sniggeringly dismissive attitude exemplified by this Washington Post story about Donald Trump’s taste in food:

For some people, what’s coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth is downright scary. Almost as frightening, at least to those of us who see the stomach as a window to the soul, is what is going in.

Wendy’s on his custom Boeing 757 while campaigning with Jerry Falwell Jr. in Iowa. McDonald’s with advisers during a swing through New Hampshire. Two eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns and two biscuits at the Ham House during a pit stop in Greenville, S.C.

The world is his oyster, but that’s not what he’s consuming. The front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination eats like a teenage boy, inhaling Filets-o-Fish and Big Macs. “It’s great stuff,” he says of his fast-food habit. At a time when growing, cooking and enjoying food in the United States is yuuuuge, his preferences are surprisingly pedestrian—and passe, as if Alice Waters had never been born and food were fuel (albeit dirty gas as opposed to premium).

Note the transition from “some people” to “us.” As in: Not our kind, dearie. After which come the sneers. I’m no fan of Donald Trump—that’s putting it very, very mildly—but I also know that of such sneers are revolutions made.

This “news” story is, in its minor but nonetheless revealing way, illustrative of the condition that now increasingly prevails in American society, which is that those who disagree no longer have anything to say to each other. Fact-based argument has been replaced by reflexive contempt. Nor should this be in any way surprising. In a totally polarized political environment, persuasion is no longer possible: we believe what we believe, and nothing matters but class and power. We are well on the way to becoming a land of jerking knees.

Never before have I felt so strongly that Americans are talking past instead of to one another. It is, I fear, our future and our fate—which is why I have come to believe that I will live to see Red and Blue America negotiate a “soft disunion.” No, there won’t be a second civil war. I can’t imagine the citizens of Blue America waging a shooting war over much of anything, least of all continued union with people whom they disdain. (Red America is a different story.) But the gap that separates the two Americas has grown so deep and wide that I find it increasingly difficult to imagine their caring to function as a single nation for very much longer. If I’m right, then I expect that they will ultimately find a more or less polite way to stop doing so.

The main obstacle that stands in the way of the soft disunion of America is that Red and Blue America are not geographically disjunct, as were the North and South in the Civil War. Even in the biggest and reddest of states, there are deep-blue enclaves that have no wish to be absorbed into the whole. Perhaps they will be the West Berlins of the twenty-first century, tiny islands of dissent in vast seas of concord. But if the desire to separate is strong enough, then the problem will surely be solved one way or another. Abraham Lincoln said it: “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” And so we may, sundered by inattention.

And then…what? Given the present state of American presidential politics, I fear that few will lament the disintegration of the United States of America as it has previously been understood. Indeed, many may see it as blessed deliverance from the horrors of an increasingly unpeaceful cultural coexistence. But for those of us who love America, messy and confused as it is, soft disunion will be a terrible thing, no less terrible for having been effected politely.