Archives for June 2016

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)

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 SOON 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 HOUSTON:
• Saint Joan (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes June 18, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BALTIMORE:
• Death of a Salesman (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BROOKLYN:
• The Judas Kiss (drama, R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Tug of War: Foreign Fire (Shakespeare, PG-13, six-hour marathon staging of Edward III, Henry V, and Henry VI, Part One, reviewed here)

“I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.”

Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism

Twitter, like the world itself, is populated partly by thoughtful, open-minded people and partly by knee-jerking robots of flesh and blood who are incapable of reacting other than automatically and reflexively to the external stimuli of life. Mention anything bad that Donald Trump just did and within seconds you’ll be pelted by tweets hastening to assure you that Hillary Clinton does the very same thing, only (A) more often and (B) much worse.

It works both ways, of course. Most things do—which is my point. I tweeted the other day that if I owned a time machine, I’d set it to 1959, and a minute or so later I heard from a stranger who was under the mistaken impression that I needed to be reminded that things weren’t so hot for blacks and women back then. Shame on me, in other words, for daring to suppose that America in 1959—the year in which, among other noteworthy things, Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway—was something other than a stinking cesspool of pure, unmitigated hate.

I rarely reply to such self-righteous folk, there being no point in it. Arguing with a robot, be he or she of the right or left, is like arguing with a drunk. Once in a while, though, somebody tweets something so shatteringly obtuse that I find it impossible to keep my big mouth shut. Only yesterday, for example, I was engaged in a three-way “conversation” about Bill Dana, a once-popular standup comedian of the Sixties whose act consisted in large part of an impersonation of a slow-witted Bolivian by the name of José Jiménez. I hadn’t thought of him for years when a friend of mine tweeted, apropos of Donald Trump’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, that he’d recently heard an old José Jiménez routine on Sirius XM. “Not only wasn’t it funny, it really was appallingly racist,” he said. (My friend, for the record, happens to be a very well-known neoconservative.)

This surprised me, for I had vivid childhood memories of enjoying Dana’s TV appearances, though the only specific thing I could remember about them was his invariable opening line, “My name…José Jiménez,” which he delivered in a foot-thick south-of-the-border accent. Since Dana was a regular on variety shows well into the Seventies, I figured I wouldn’t have any trouble tracking down one of his routines on YouTube, so I went there and spent a few minutes refreshing my memory. I, too, was startled by the unthinking racism of Dana’s old-fashioned style of comedy, and said so in my reply. “Kind of amazing how it makes Amos & Andy seem sort of mild by comparison,” another follower added.

A stranger then muscled into what up to that moment had been a perfectly peaceable chat, belligerently pointing out that we were talking about a fifty-year-old comedy routine and that I needed to “lighten up.” “Do you find it funny and charming now?” I responded. “Because that’s what we’re talking about. Hell, I thought it was funny fifty years ago—but I was ten years old, and that was fifty years ago.” The stranger promptly tweeted back something boorish in response. “Fuck off,” I replied, then blocked him. (I’m no longer civil to uncivil people on Twitter.) That little exchange attracted the attention of yet another bonehead, who tweeted as follows: “An Hispanic doing an exaggerated Hispanic accent is racist? Hillary has affected accent when in black church.” Recognizing a robot when I saw one, I limited myself this time to pointing out that Dana, far from being Hispanic, was of Hungarian-Jewish descent. Answer, not surprisingly, came there none, and the conversation drifted off in other directions, as Twitter chats are wont to do.

Which brings us right back to where we started. Those who think that human life is anything other than a fearfully complicated and ambiguous affair are kidding themselves. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have powerful feelings of nostalgia and love for the simpler, quieter world of my small-town childhood—but you also know that the last American lynching to take place outside the Deep South occurred in my home town in 1942, and that I happen to be just old enough to clearly remember seeing, and using, separate entrances for “white” and “colored.” I need no “schooling” about such horrors. Unlike my self-appointed schoolmasters, I saw them for myself.

Alas, I increasingly incline to suspect that many, perhaps most people don’t think at all. Instead they react, almost always in the most predictable way possible, and every “opinion” they have fits together neatly—and tiresomely. Such folk take it for granted that I must be evil or unenlightened (to them, there’s no difference) because I persist in believing that America in 1959 was neither all good nor all bad. Or because I take the dimmest possible view of the social-justice warriors who are currently engaging in such lunatic and dangerous antics as this. Or, for that matter, because I no longer find José Jiménez funny.

Isaiah Berlin said it:

You must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.

And if you think otherwise? Then my considered reply to you is: fuck off.

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Bill Dana in an undated kinescope of one of his TV appearances from the Sixties:

A scene from the 1959 film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, starring Sidney Poitier:

An extremely rare film clip of Carol Channing performing the title number from Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! in 1965 with members of the original Broadway cast. This is a (mostly) silent film of a command performance given at the White House for Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The soundtrack is drawn from the original-cast album:

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

“You know, more often than not, a so-called ambitious fellow is simply showing off for someone he loved a darn sight more than the job he’s doing. A woman, usually. A woman who thinks he’s a great man. Erase that incentive and the show-off becomes what he really is—a meringue pie that goes to pieces with one good squash.”

John Twist, screenplay for The Great Man Votes (spoken in the film by John Barrymore)

From 2006:

Of the giving of prizes there is no end, and it’s hard to think of a single one, however ostensibly prestigious, that hasn’t been devalued by the promiscuity and/or lack of discrimination with which it is handed out.

I’m not here to beat up on Neil Simon–I’ve done that enough in my Wall Street Journal drama column in the past couple of years. Instead, I want to ask a question that seems to me obvious but turns out not to be: has there ever been a prize in the arts that was worth having? Is it possible for any institution to give an award for artistic achievement that has real significance?

Looking back over the long history of such prizes, it strikes me that even the best-laid and most idealistic institutional plans are inevitably subverted over time by non-artistic considerations. Sooner or later the temptation to inflate the currency in one way or another becomes irresistible…

Read the whole thing here.

“Most people in my day went on stage to annoy their parents.”

Robert Newton (quoted in Charles Duff,The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre)

On Saturday afternoon I went directly from Penn Station to New York’s Center for Italian Modern Art to see an exhibition of some forty-odd paintings and works on paper by Giorgio Morandi. His work has long had special meaning for me, so much so that I once went so far as to bid—unsuccessfully, alas—on a Morandi etching at Sotheby’s, an experience for which the only possible word is…well, chastening. (Exhilarating, too, but I would have gladly traded the excitement for the etching.)

I wrote a Washington Post column about a gallery show of Morandi’s paintings back in 2004. I still feel the same way about them:

The effect of this show is wildly disproportionate to its minuscule size: six oil paintings and two works on paper, all of them still lifes and none in any obvious way imposing. Yet as you look at how the greatest Italian artist of the twentieth century century painstakingly arranged and rearranged a dozen bottles, bowls and boxes on a table and painted them over and over again, you find yourself whisked out of the grinding noise of everyday urban life and spirited away to a place of intense stillness. It’s as if a soft-spoken man had slipped discreetly into a small room open to the public, whispering life-changing confidences to the fortunate few who visit him there.

What gives Morandi’s paintings their near-inscrutable power? It’s partly the brushwork, at once delicate and forthright, and partly the extreme subtlety with which he varied his narrow palette of colors. I’m no less fascinated by the way in which he pushes himself to the edge of abstraction in so many of his later works. Those homely objects (some of them easily recognizable from canvas to canvas) grow increasingly vaporous, even transparent…

Though coveted by connoisseurs, Morandi’s tabletop microcosms have never been popular in this country, or anywhere else. None of them is currently hanging in a New York museum (though two exquisite etchings just went on the block at Sotheby’s), nor has Morandi ever been the subject of a full-scale American retrospective. Until last month, Washington was the only city on this side of the Atlantic where you could occasionally see more than one of his paintings at a time: three at the Hirshhorn, two at the Phillips. In addition, several regional museums own individual Morandis—there’s one in Princeton, N.J., for instance, and another in St. Louis—but if you want to see his work in bulk, you pretty much have to go to the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy, from which three paintings in this show are on loan.

Four years later the Metropolitan Museum of Art finally mounted a large-scale retrospective, to which I went twice. But the very idea of a blockbuster show devoted to an artist like Morandi, as I wrote at the time, was a contradiction in terms:

The curators of the show made the inexplicable and irreparable mistake of installing it in a high-traffic area that is mere steps away from the museum’s new downstairs cafeteria. As a result, “Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964” is drawing large numbers of people who would rather talk than look at art, not a few of whom seem unaware that the use of a cellphone within five hundred yards of a Morandi still life would be punishable by death and/or dismemberment if I had anything to do with it….

Morandi is a difficult painter, one whose still lifes inevitably strike the casual viewer as both repetitive and plain. They require close, quiet attention in order to be appreciated. Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence is the apt title of a monograph about Morandi published a couple of years ago. It is inconceivable that anyone capable of talking in the presence of Morandi’s late watercolors, which are so concentrated and oblique as to border on outright abstraction, could possibly be appreciating them.

Not so the show at the Center for Italian Modern Art. While it is, to be sure, comparatively large—this is only the third time in my life that I’ve seen more than a half-dozen Morandis in one place—CIMA is presenting the paintings in a way infinitely better suited to their intimate essence. In order to see them, you must make an appointment to tour the center, which is located in lower Manhattan. When you arrive, you first sit down in the kitchen with your fellow visitors and drink an excellent cup of espresso made by the staff. Then one of CIMA’s resident scholars (ours was Nicola Lucchi) walks you through the show, talking very intelligently about the artist and his work. Once the tour is finished, you’re free to wander at will through the three rooms where the paintings are hung. These rooms are all furnished in such a way as to suggest a private home, with plenty of couches and chairs on which you can sit, look, and reflect for as long as you like.

Having collected art for more than a decade, I know what a priceless privilege it is to be able to look at paintings in a domestic setting. But if, in addition, you must make your home in a noisy city like New York, then it is not merely a privilege but a necessity to retreat at regular intervals from the hum and buzz of urban life and commune with the work of an artist who, like Morandi, has the power to fill the soul with silence. In the absence of such silences—and such art—there can be no thought, no imagination, no respite from the unceasing flow of words, most of them pointless, that blunts our capacity to think and feel.

Josef Pieper said it: “Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.” Blessings, then, on CIMA for creating a refuge in the midst of clamor to which the exhausted urbanite can withdraw to look, contemplate, and love.

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“Giorgio Morandi” is on view through June 25 at the Center for Italian Modern Art, located at 421 Broome Street in New York. For more information, go here.

To purchase the catalogue, go here.