Archives for November 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, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Encounter (one-man immersive drama, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 8, 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, 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)
• Finian’s Rainbow (small-scale musical revival, G, extended through Dec. 31, reviewed here)
• Love, Love, Love (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Plenty (drama, PG-13, closes Dec. 1, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, extended through Dec. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Roads to Home (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, closes Nov. 27, reviewed here)

My Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s new play. Here’s an excerpt.

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Here’s my number-one recommendation for life in the Age of Trump: Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” now playing at New York’s Public Theater through Dec. 18, should transfer to Broadway as soon as an uptown theater becomes available. It’s a play about the unemployed steel workers of Reading, the Pennsylvania city that has become synonymous with deindustrialization—and it opened at the Public just a week before the election. Beyond its high quality as a work of art, what makes “Sweat” so significant is that Berks County, Pa., of which Reading is the county seat, went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 93,094-75,169. Eight years ago it went for Barack Obama over John McCain, 97,047-80,513. Between them, those numbers say a great deal about the 2016 presidential race, which is why Mr. Trump’s victory won’t have taken you wholly by surprise if you saw “Sweat” prior to last Tuesday.

But while Ms. Nottage has written a political play in the broadest sense, the key to understanding “Sweat” is not that its author is black, or a political progressive. While both these things are true, “Sweat” was written prior to Mr. Trump’s emergence as the leader of the Republican pack, and he goes unmentioned in the play, which takes place between 2000 and 2008. Nor did Ms. Nottage write “Sweat” to persuade anyone to do anything in particular. Her purpose was simply to show us how the people of Reading feel, and to try to explain why they feel that way.

To this end, she did something that playwrights too often fail to do: She went to Reading and talked to the people about whom she was writing. More important, she listened to them—hard….

Ms. Nottage’s open-eared reporting is part of what makes “Sweat” so good. But most of what makes it good is that it’s an impeccably solid piece of theatrical work—tightly structured, free of wordy sermonizing, full of surprises. The drama is personal, a story of real people pushed into a corner, and broader implications are left unspoken….

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Read the whole thing here.

Lynn Nottage talks about her research for Sweat:

“There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We can’t be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn’t matter being unhappy. This doctrine is heroic, and, in a bad world, useful; but it is neither quite true nor, in a fundamental sense, quite sincere.”

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Donald Gramm and Richard Cumming perform Charles Ives’ “Two Little Flowers,” “Serenity,” and “Charlie Rutlage” on TV. The performance, originally broadcast on WGBH-TV in 1965 as part of a series called Aaron Copland: Music in the ’20s, are introduced and discussed by Copland:

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

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

From 2006:

I especially appreciated the irony of seeing Rhett and Scarlett galloping toward Tara to the accompaniment of Miles Davis, whose opinion of Gone With the Wind is unrecorded but must surely have been unprintable in the extreme. To be sure, I didn’t get to hear Clark Gable’s deliciously growly voice or Max Steiner’s lush score, but I was also spared Vivien Leigh’s flibbertigibbet accent (they really should have dubbed her) and the pitiful minstrel-show antics of Butterfly “I Don’t Know Nuthin’ ‘Bout Birthin’ Babies!” McQueen….

Read the whole thing here.

“The winds of gossip blow from the chests of people ventilating their opinions.”

Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick, courtesy of Richard Zuelch)

While renting a tux the other day, I got to chatting with the young woman behind the counter, a smiling beauty who had the most gorgeous set of dreadlocks I’ve ever seen. I happened to mentioned that I was sixty years old. She looked surprised, not in a stagey way but guilelessly, and said, quite matter-of-factly, “You’re not sixty.”

Sweet words, those, but I’ve got the birth cerfificate somewhere around here to prove the impeccability of my sexagenarian status. I crossed that meridian right on time and without event nine months ago, and I didn’t feel any different on February 6 than I had on February 5.

This isn’t to say, of course, that I don’t feel any different today than I did ten years ago, much less twenty. To be sure, I don’t feel dramatically older. I’m in good health, infinitely better than in the fall of 2005, when I was slipping into what could easily have been a terminal tailspin. My appetite for work remains undiminished—if anything, it’s greater now than ever before—and nothing excites me more than the prospect of a brand-new professional challenge.

Nevertheless, I’m constantly aware that I’m older than I used to be. My knees hurt whenever I sit down in a chair that’s a bit too low for me. I stop cold in the middle of a conversation at least once a day and realize that I can’t come up with a name, usually of something or someone very familiar to me. Just the other day I was taping a podcast with a friend and found myself incapable of recalling the title of one of my favorite plays, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. It came back to me a moment later and I made an on-air joke about my memory lapse, but I can’t tell you how much it irks me to fumble for art-related names. Time was when I had something close to a perfect memory for such things, enough so that I was vain about it. Now…well, I’m just like everybody else.

I have also reached a milestone of life that promises to grow steadily more disagreeable in the years that remains to me, which is that the pop musicians I loved in high school and college are starting to die off. First Leonard Cohen, then Leon Russell, and suddenly I caught myself yelling Enough already! But of course the obituary page is omnipresent once you cross the sixtieth parallel: it reminds you each day that it’s you or them, and that sooner or later the piece you’ll never read will finally see print.

Death, of course, has stalked me ever since I lost my then-best friend, Nancy LaMott, a few weeks shy of my fortieth birthday. My father died two years after that, and somewhere around that time I noticed that my hair was starting to turn gray. Now most of it is silver, “senior moments” (that loathsome euphemism) have become a regular occurrence, and I wince each time I turn to the obits.

Is there cold comfort to be found in the loss of youth? Yes and no. I wouldn’t willingly live much of my adolescence over again, but I had a happy childhood and loved most of my college days. For me the real nightmare decade was the forties, the years when people started dying on me and I weathered a midlife crisis about which the only good thing to be said is that I didn’t do anything grossly stupid in public. It ended with my calling an ambulance for myself and surviving a brush with death that preceded my fiftieth birthday by two months. Then I pulled myself together, set up shop with my beloved Mrs. T, retrofitted myself as an artist, and basically had the time of my life.

So what do my sixties hold in store? Judging by the chaos of the past couple of decades, I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t a clue, save for the iron certainty that I’ll continue to have trouble remembering names—but so far, so good. May it remain so. Nevertheless, do this for me if you will: should we meet in a public place, please, please don’t introduce yourself by asking “Do you remember me?” If you do, both of us may be in for an unpleasant shock.

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Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sing “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore,” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, with special lyrics by Sammy Cahn. This performance was originally telecast on The Bing Crosby Show for Oldsmobile on September 29, 1959: