Archives for July 2016

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Massachusetts production of The Pirates of Penzance. Here’s an excerpt.

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Rejoice greatly! John Rando and Joshua Bergasse, whose 2013 Barrington Stage revival of “On the Town” moved to Broadway the following year and ran for 368 performances, have joined forces again: Barrington Stage has reunited the best of all possible director-choreographer teams for a rumbustious production of “The Pirates of Penzance” that is strongly cast, delightfully designed and whizzingly well-staged. It’s no less worthy of a New York transfer than “On the Town,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if one is in the works.

Should this “Pirates” make it to Broadway, it’ll be none too soon. The comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan are not-so-distant ancestors of the modern-day American musical, yet they’re rarely revived in this country by professional theater troupes. I’ve reviewed just two productions in the past 13 years, and it’s been three decades since an operetta by G & S (as they’re known to their avid fans) was last mounted on Broadway. It is, alas, all too easy to see why. Not only is “The Mikado,” their masterpiece, now widely regarded as politically incorrect, but Sullivan wrote his scores for classically trained singers, meaning that when the operettas do get done professionally, it increasingly tends to be by opera companies like Chicago’s Lyric Opera….

This helps to explain why only one G & S operetta has had a long commercial run on Broadway. In 1980, the Public Theater commissioned William Elliott to revise “The Pirates of Penzance” to make Sullivan’s score more suitable for performance by musical-comedy actors and Broadway-sized pit bands. The resulting production, which starred Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, opened to immensely successful effect in Central Park, then played for two years on Broadway, after which it was filmed. No other G & S production has reached a larger audience.

It stands to reason, then, that Barrington Stage should have opted to produce Elliott’s version of “Pirates” in its 520-seat mainstage theater. Beowulf Borritt’s comic-strip set features a runway that juts straight out into the auditorium—the mainmast of the ship on which the first act takes place dead center in the house—and Mr. Rando has filled both aisles to overflowing with actors. The effect is noisily intimate: If you’re sitting on the aisle or in one of the two stage boxes, you’re more than likely to have pirates in your face at one time or another, and you might even get pulled out of your seat to take part in the action. Mr. Rando, a recognized master of slapstick, keeps the energy level vaultingly high, and Mr. Bergasse’s choreography is irresistibly ludicrous….

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Read the whole thing here.

The finale from the Public Theater’s 1980 Central Park production of The Pirates of Penzance, directed by Wilford Leach and starring Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt, and George Rose:

Jule Styne plays his songs and talks about his career with Hugh Downs, then performs “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (from Gypsy, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim). This interview was originally telecast on PBS as part of a 1979 episode of Over Easy, a talk show hosted by Downs:

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

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report and reflect on an exhibition of the “serious” paintings of N.C. Wyeth. Here’s an excerpt.

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I can’t remember the last time I heard a screenwriter, a mystery novelist or a show-tune composer express regret for having embraced so “lowly” a calling. Nowadays, popular artists know that what they do is valuable in its own right. It hardly seems possible that when Aaron Copland went to Hollywood in 1939 to score Lewis Milestone’s film version of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” many of his fellow highbrows were sure that he was finished as a classical composer. Today, they’d ask him for a letter of recommendation.

I thought of Copland’s film scores when I went to see “N.C. Wyeth: Painter,” an exhibition on display through December 31 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Wyeth, who died in 1945, was the father of Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most famous and beloved American painter of the 20th century. In his lifetime, though, N.C. was equally famous—though not as a maker of what we stubbornly continue to call “fine art.” He was, rather, the most highly paid commercial illustrator of his day. While Wyeth is now mainly known for having illustrated such children’s classics as “Robinson Crusoe,” “Treasure Island” and “The Yearling,” his work also appeared on the covers of mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, and in ads for Cream of Wheat and Lucky Strike cigarettes….

But Wyeth believed that he was squandering his great gifts. Unable to regard illustration as anything more than “the art of journalism, to be rendered in the manner of painting,” he dreamed of being praised as “a painter who has shaken the dust of the illustrator from his heels!!” So he spent his spare time working on landscapes, portraits and studies of life in coastal Maine, where he spent his summers. He saw these paintings, which bear such homely titles as “The Harbor Herring Gut” and “Fisherman’s Family,” as “the beginning of more important self-expression,” and they were intended not for magazines but galleries—and, eventually, museums….

Art critics and historians haven’t had much to say about Wyeth’s “serious” work. David Michaelis, author of “N.C. Wyeth,” an excellent 1998 biography which argues that his illustrations deserve to be taken very seriously indeed—a point of view now generally accepted by scholars—wrote off Wyeth’s “independent” paintings in a single curt sentence: “He deliberately intended these paintings to be taken as statements of his most personal feelings, yet he left out or deflated the very pictorial elements that made his canvases most his own.”

To visit the Farnsworth, however, is to realize that Mr. Michaelis got it almost exactly wrong. These burgeoningly vital, at times near-primitive paintings, whose bold swashes of magenta and turquoise recall the Fauvism of André Derain and Henri Matisse, make Andrew look prim….

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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, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, closes Sept. 10, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, 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 EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Bye Bye Birdie (musical, G, closes Sept. 8, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Company (musical, PG-13, extended through Aug. 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Fully Committed (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (January 6, 1816)

The Miles Davis Quintet plays “No Blues” on The Steve Allen Show. The other musicians are Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. This program was originally telecast on September 10, 1964, six days after Shorter joined the group:

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

“Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.”

W. Somerset Maugham, “Mr. Harrington’s Washing”