Archives for August 2016

Benny Goodman appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? This episode was telecast by CBS on July 22, 1962. The host is John Charles Daly and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Buddy Hackett, and Dorothy Kilgallen:

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

“Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.”

George Meredith, The Egoist

From 2006:

Do I wish I lived in a simpler time? Occasionally–but I grew up in a much simpler time, and though I recall with nostalgia my days of slow-moving innocence, I can’t begin to imagine doing without cellphones, laptops, and iPods. I spent the first ten years of my career as a professional writer clicking away at a manual typewriter, and I don’t miss that old black monster in the slightest, any more than I regret the invention of the pills I take twice a day in order to defer for as long as possible the appointment with the Distinguished Thing about which I dreamed the other night….

Read the whole thing here.

“The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?”

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Forgive my recent semi-absence from this space, but I’ve been inordinately busy of late, quite a bit more than I expected to be. Among other things, the Mosaic Theater Company’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which began previews last Thursday, opens tonight in Washington, D.C.

This is, unlikely as it may sound, Satchmo’s twelfth staging to date. It’s already been produced in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, Beverly Hills, Chicago, San Francisco, Portsmouth, Colorado Springs, West Palm Beach, and Sacramento, with the Baton Rouge premiere set for next month. Craig Wallace, Mosaic’s star, will be the fifth person to play the triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis, and Eleanor Holdridge is the sixth person to direct the show.

Washington is one of the cities in which I’ve most wanted to see Satchmo staged, and the Mosaic’s production is everything I’d hoped for. I attended the third rehearsal a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t stay for more than a day (I had other shows to see). So I flew from Connecticut to Washington yesterday morning for the last preview, and I’ll be in the house again for the invitation-only opening-night performance. I’m very pleased by how the production has taken shape. Eleanor’s staging and Andrew Cohen’s set are more naturalistic than their predecessors, but I’m good with that: I like seeing sharply contrasting approaches to Satchmo, and the up-close intimacy of this new version speaks very strongly to me. As for Craig, he’s flat-out fabulous.

I wasn’t able to make it to Sacramento for B Street Theatre’s production, which opened last week, nor will I be able to go to Baton Rouge to see New Venture Theatre’s two-night run of Satchmo in September. It never occurred to me when I wrote it six years ago that Satchmo would eventually become so popular that I’d find it impossible to keep up with all of its various productions. Yet that’s what’s happened, and I don’t quite know what to make of it. More and more I find myself feeling like a father whose no-longer-young child has flown the coop at last. I can’t do much for him anymore: he’s on his own now, making his way in the world for better or worse as I look on from afar with a mixture of bemusement and paternal pride.

In honor of all three productions, I’m posting, as I always do whenever a show of mine opens, my good-luck video:

Break a leg, everybody!

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The Mosaic Theater Company’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf runs in Washington, D.C., through September 25. To order tickets or for more information, go here.

B Street Theatre’s production of Satchmo runs in Sacramento, California, through September 17. To order tickets or for more information, go here.

New Venture Theatre will perform Satchmo in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 10 and 11. To order tickets or for more information, go here.

Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform “Mack the Knife” in concert in 1956:

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

Music resembles poetry: in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach
And which a master-hand alone can reach.

Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Mint Theater Company’s off-Broadway revival of N.C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea. Here’s an excerpt.

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No drama troupe in America has carved out a more distinctive niche for itself than the Mint Theater Company. According to its mission statement, the Mint “finds and produces worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” These bland-sounding words disguise a refreshing originality of taste on the part of Jonathan Bank, the company’s artistic director. Since I started reviewing the Mint a decade ago, it’s presented, among many other memorable shows, Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” Harley Granville-Barker’s “The Madras House,” John Galsworthy’s “The Skin Game,” N.C. Hunter’s “A Picture of Autumn,” George Kelly’s “The Fatal Weakness,” Jules Romains’ “Doctor Knock” and John Van Druten’s “London Wall.” All of these plays were essentially unknown to contemporary American audiences before the Mint revived them, and all received superlative small-scale off-Broadway stagings that made convincing cases for their excellence. What other drama company, here or abroad, can make the same claim for its revivals?

Now, though, the Mint has outdone itself with its latest effort, N.C. Hunter’s “A Day by the Sea,” for me the finest of the noteworthy plays that Mr. Bank has exhumed to date. It is, in fact, that rarest of rarities, a forgotten masterpiece, acted by the best ensemble cast I’ve seen in recent seasons and staged with taut vitality by Austin Pendleton. First performed in London in 1953, “A Day by the Sea” has only been staged once in New York, in 1955. Yet it’s so good as to make you wonder how Hunter, who died in 1971, could have dropped off the map of English-language theater.

The answer, I fear, is that a critic did him dirty. Kenneth Tynan, who in the Fifties was England’s most influential drama reviewer, attacked “A Day by the Sea” as “an evening of unexampled triviality…Mr. Hunter’s pseudo-Chekhov is about as close to the real thing as an aspidistra to a woodland fern.” Tynan favored the Angry Young Men of the British stage and had little use for plays without a political message, and “A Day by the Sea,” a quiet character study written in the manner of Anton Chekhov, Hunter’s avowed master, was just the sort of show that he longed to push out of London’s West End. Even though the play’s original production, which starred John Gielgud (who doubled as director) and Ralph Richardson, had a long run, Hunter’s reputation never recovered from Tynan’s slating.

To see “A Day by the Sea” at long last is to realize how absurdly wrong Tynan was. A portrait of a priggish, frustrated diplomat (Julian Elfer) and a widowed mother (Katie Firth) who have reached the near shore of middle age and wonder whether life has more to offer than they’ve had so far, it’s trivial only if you think the lives of ordinary middle-class people are trivial….

Ms. Firth, a familiar face to fans of the Mint, and Mr. Elfer, who is new to me, are as good as they could possibly be, though no more so than the eight other members of the cast, all of whom give vividly drawn performances. As for Mr. Pendleton, he knows that the trick to making a play like “A Day by the Sea” work is to winkle out the laughs and let the pathos take care of itself…

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Read the whole thing here.

A video clip from the dress rehearsal of A Day by the Sea: