Archives for June 2016

From 2006:

Lauren and I went to the Empire State Building observatory today, an undertaking that entails standing in line for at least an hour (unless you pay extra for an “express” ticket, a newfangled piece of cash-and-carry privilege that sticks in my craw). The long line is set up in such a way that you spend much of your time shuffling forward, thus creating the illusion of progress. Most of the people waiting to board the elevators to the eighty-sixth floor were teenagers, and though they came from all over the world, most of them were dressed identically….

Read the whole thing here.

Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf closed yesterday afternoon after a month-long run. The occasion was necessarily darkened, for me and everyone else, by what happened elsewhere in Florida over the weekend, so I will say only that my professional directing debut, about which I wrote in detail immediately after the fact, was and will always be one of the great events of my life.

What comes next? We’ll see. For now, though, it’s enough to say that my heart overflows with gratitude to everyone who made the production possible, starting with Bill Hayes, the company’s artistic director, whose idea it was for me to direct Satchmo, and Barry Shabaka Henley, who played the triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis with incomparable charisma and imagination. Blessings on you all.

In case you’re wondering, two brand-new productions of Satchmo will be opening in August, at Sacramento’s B Street Theatre on August 20 and at Washington’s Mosaic Theatre on August 25. I’ll do my best to be there. You come, too.

Denny Zeitlin plays his composition “Quiet Now” at the 1983 Berlin Jazz Festival:

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

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Washington-area revival of Floyd Collins. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Floyd Collins,” the 1996 musical in which Adam Guettel and Tina Landau told the tale of the hapless spelunker who got himself trapped in Kentucky’s Sand Cave in 1925 and so triggered the first modern media frenzy, is greatly admired but has never been popular and is rarely revived professionally. I’ve reviewed the show only once in this space, in Chicago four years ago, at which time I called it “the first great post-Sondheim musical.” Even that was an understatement: “Floyd Collins” is the finest work of American musical theater, not excluding opera, to come along since Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” But it is also, for all its surface simplicity, harder to produce than you’d think, which is one reason why stagings of this genre-transcending masterpiece are so uncommon.

It is, therefore, very good news that 1st Stage, which operates out of a 100-seat theater located in a suburban strip mall not far from Washington, D.C., has given “Floyd Collins” a worthy revival, one as emotionally compelling as the production of “Side Man” that first brought the company to my attention in 2012. The cast is strong, the musical preparation impressively thorough, and notwithstanding certain weaknesses in design, the show itself, plainly and effectively directed by Nick Olcott, comes through with tremendous force. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being touched to the heart by this revival.

“Floyd Collins” has little but its subject matter in common with “Ace in the Hole,” the 1951 movie in which Billy Wilder portrayed with fathomlessly black cynicism the hoopla whipped up by Collins’ plight. To be sure, it does show us what happened above ground at Sand Cave, but that pop-culture circus is presented by Mr. Guettel and Ms. Landau not as a “Babbitt”-like skewering of the Roaring Twenties but as a melancholy episode in the inexorable coming of modernity to rural America. Moreover, the focus of the show is on Collins himself (played at 1st Stage by Evan Casey). His desperate struggle becomes a parable of purification by suffering, a not-quite-secular passion play that ends with a soaring aria in which the dying Collins sings of his hallucinatory vision of the substance of things not seen: “Has a shinin’ truth been waiting there/For all the questions everywhere?”…

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Read the whole thing here.

A preview of the 1st Stage production of Floyd Collins:

A scene from Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas:

Romain Frugé, who played the title role in the 1996 Playwrights Horizons production of Floyd Collins, sings “How Glory Goes” at the 2003 reunion concert by the original cast:

Groucho Marx sings “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” in At the Circus, directed by Edward Buzzell and released in 1939. The words are by Yip Harburg and the music is by Harold Arlen:

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

“I believe that in India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World