Archives for 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)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Nov. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 30, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• A Day by the Sea (drama, G, not suitable for children, newly extended through Oct. 30, reviewed here)
• A Taste of Honey (drama, PG-13, newly extended through Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Wonderful Town (musical, G, closes Oct. 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN TYSON, VA.:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them.”

V.S. Pritchett, “Evelyn Waugh: Club and Country”

One last reminder: John Douglas Thompson and I are speaking at the Drama Book Shop tonight. We’ll be discussing, taking questions about, and signing copies of the published version of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-man-three-character play about the life of Louis Armstrong, in which John has starred to spectacular effect off Broadway and from coast to coast.

The Drama Book Shop is at 250 W. 40th St. in New York. The event starts at five p.m. sharp. For more information, go here.

Paul Draper improvises a jazz dance on Rainbow Quest, a TV series hosted by Pete Seeger. This episode was taped in 1965:

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

“On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.”

V.S. Pritchett, “Rider Haggard: Still Riding”

From 2006:

I loathe biographers who nudge you in the ribs every few pages, sticking in pointed little reminders that the deeply suppressed sadomasochistic tendencies (or whatever) of Flannery O’Connor (or whoever) permeated her life and thought and insinuated their way into every page she wrote, blah blah blah. Who among us hasn’t thrown up his hands in despair at the prospect of reading another such book, especially when it’s nine hundred pages long? Repeat after me: show, don’t tell. Let the reader draw his own conclusions….

Read the whole thing here.

“Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.”

V.S. Pritchett, “Rider Haggard: Still Riding”

As I approach the far shore of middle age, I can now say without exaggeration that I remember a fair number of things that happened a half-century ago. It feels more than a little bit strange to use that resonant phrase with reference to myself, but it’s nothing more than the truth: I was born sixty years ago, which means that I was ten years old in 1966, old enough to have already accumulated a good-sized scrapbook of memories.

To be sure, anyone who unquestioningly trusts the accuracy of such youthful memories is a fool. I like to think that I’ve retained a few brief flashes that predate my kindergarten days, but I suspect that most of them are in fact derived from the innumerable photographs and home movies that my father took when I was a little boy. As for my awareness of the world beyond the city limits of Smalltown, U.S.A., it started with the assassination of President Kennedy, of which I do have one verifiable first-hand memory: I still have a startlingly sharp mental picture of Jackie Grant, my second-grade elementary-school teacher, telling her students that the president of the United States had been shot and killed in Dallas, after which we were all sent home.

That indelible moment is, however, one of a bare handful of my early recollections of life in the larger world that isn’t an echo of something I watched on TV. I am a member of the first generation of Americans who grew up with television and took its existence for granted. What I saw on the small screen seemed perfectly real to me. Eleven months after the Kennedy assassination, I saw Louis Armstrong on TV for the first time, and I have no doubt of the exact verisimilitude of my memory of that life-changing event, which I described in the afterword to Pops:

I thank my mother, who called me into the living room of our Missouri home one Sunday night and sat me down in front of the TV, on which Louis Armstrong was singing “Hello, Dolly!” on The Ed Sullivan Show. “This man won’t be around forever,” she said. “Someday you’ll be glad you saw him.”

So I was—and am.

That happened on October 4, 1964. I turned ten a year and a half later, at which point the half-opaque veil of the past naturally becomes more transparent. I remember quite a lot about my ten-year-old self and the town in which I lived—but not much about the rest of the world. Just the other day I looked up Wikipedia’s timeline of events in 1966, thinking that I might find a bit of fodder for a Wall Street Journal column about the fiftieth anniversary of something or other. It was, not surprisingly, an eventful year, but I was struck most forcibly by how little I noticed at the time about its most consequential occurrences. Nineteen sixty-six was, among many other noteworthy things, the year in which Lenny Bruce, Montgomery Clift, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Hofmann, Buster Keaton, Evelyn Waugh, and Clifton Webb died, but I didn’t yet know who any of those men were.

As for Julie Manet, who died on July 14, I knew nothing of her then or for many decades to come. It certainly would never have occurred to me that an etching of Édouard’s beautiful niece would be hanging in my New York apartment fifty years hence, much less that I would even have a New York apartment. In 1966, and for several more years afterward, I took it for granted that I would spend the rest of my life in Smalltown, U.S.A.

The main thing I remember about 1966 was the death of Walt Disney, an event that was by definition a big deal for a child of ten. Everything else that happened that year pales by comparison. I recall nothing of the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House, for instance, or Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California, nor did I take note of the release of Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds. As for Miranda v. Arizona, in which the Supreme Court ruled that police must inform suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning them, I heard about it only because Dragnet, my father’s favorite TV show, soon made a point of incorporating Miranda warnings into Joe Friday’s dialogue.

Not surprisingly, it is my TV-related memories of 1966 that stand out most boldly, if imperfectly. That was the year in which The Dick Van Dyke Show, another family favorite, was canceled, but I can’t recall saying “Gee, I wonder what happened to Rob and Laura Petrie”? What I do remember with undiminished clarity was the premiere of another series, Star Trek, to which I soon became hopelessly addicted. I also have no trouble remembering the first showing of Chuck Jones’ TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I loved then and still love now.

I do, however, remember one national news story with unexpected clarity. On August 1, Charles Whitman took a rifle to the top floor of a tower at the University of Texas and used it to shoot and kill 14 strangers, having previously murdered his wife and mother that morning. As I watched the news that night, I was haunted by the notion that one man could kill so many people, not knowing that I would live to see such horrors become commonplace, or that Peter Bogdanovich would use this one as the inspiration for a movie released two years later whose cast included Boris Karloff, the genial voice of the Grinch.

As for the rest of 1966, it slipped past me. It wasn’t until 1968, the year that Allan Bloom would later describe as postwar America’s annus horribilis, that I started paying close and consistent attention to the world beyond the city limits of my tranquil home town. That was the year in which the contented unknowing of childhood that Philip Larkin described in “MCMXIV” came at last to a bloody end:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

* * *

The opening of NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report on August 1, 1966, in which Chet Huntley reports on the shootings in Austin, Texas:

A scene from Targets, directed by Peter Bogdanovich: