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 TYSON, VA.:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Tug of War: Civil Strife (Shakespeare, PG-13, six-hour marathon staging of Henry VI, Parts Two and Three and Richard III, reviewed here)

CLOSING TONIGHT OFF BROADWAY:
• Fiorello! (musical, G, off-Broadway transfer of 2016 regional revival, original production reviewed here)

“I get outa that bed every day, see? I make a good salary and my horn still sounds good. And I feel good. So I don’t think nobody in the world any richer than I am. Musicians don’t retire. They stop when there’s no more work. We never thought about that in New Orleans. Like we say there, ‘That our hustle,’ you know, a day’s work. But anybody sit down with their money and look at the four walls, they don’t live long; they die. There’s nothin’ I can say other than I’ve set myself up to be a happy man. And—I made it.”

Louis Armstrong (quoted in Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years)

Joni Mitchell sings “California” on The Johnny Cash Show. This episode was originally telecast by ABC in 1969:

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

“Ah! the books that one will never read again. They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by for ever. I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me. Books gentle and quieting; books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but many a time. Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few. Perhaps when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a kindness—friends passed upon the way. What regret in that last farewell!”

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

Mrs. T and I opted last Monday to watch a William Powell comedy, My Man Godfrey, instead of subjecting ourselves to the first presidential debate. When I tweeted about our decision, these responses were immediately forthcoming from two of my followers:

• “It was a different universe in which a man like that could be a major star.”

• “Released 80 years ago this month!”

The first of these comments immediately put me in mind of something that I wrote about Humphrey Bogart a few years ago in an essay called “Humphrey Bogart, Grown-Up”:

Not all the films he made from High Sierra onward are of equal merit, but Bogart’s performances even in the least of them continue to show successive generations what a full-grown man looks like. In an age that consistently values smooth-faced charmers over tough-minded realists, it is not merely refreshing but inspiring to spend time in the company of a man who, as V.S. Pritchett wrote of Sir Walter Scott, “faces life squarely” and “does not cry for the moon.” Whatever he was like in the world outside the soundstage, Humphrey Bogart was that kind of man on the screen.

William Powell was that kind of man, too. Even though he specialized in light comedy, at which he was an unrivaled virtuoso, his sardonic screen persona had an underlying weight and maturity that made it possible for him to bring off dramatic roles no less convincingly. Without it, he couldn’t have played the tricky role of Godfrey, a homeless man who suddenly finds himself serving as butler to a family of wealthy, irresponsible eccentrics, in the process leaving us in no doubt of his contempt for their lightmindedness (“I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves”).

Humphrey Bogart was similarly mature, even as a young man, and his maturity is what propels High Sierra, in which he plays Roy Earle, a weary gangster with graying hair who was even older on the screen than Bogart himself was in real life. His performance is redolent of the terminal disillusion of a man who has seen the worst of Depression-era life and been permanently scarred by it. I doubt that very many of today’s American screen stars could play such a part other than ludicrously, but Bogart, who was forty-one when High Sierra was filmed, brought it off without apparent effort. To watch him in High Sierra, or Powell in My Man Godfrey, is to understand the truth of my friend’s remark. We live in a different universe now, one in which maturity is not merely undervalued but actively shunned.

No less striking to me, though, is the fact that Powell and Bogart are so present to us now, even though both men were born in the nineteenth century. Such, needless to say, is the curse of the movie camera: if you become a film star, you will always be remembered as you were, not as you are. Only the very greatest screen actors (I’m thinking of Jeff Bridges in Hell or High Water) are capable of accepting the inescapable reality of their advancing age and using it fearlessly and creatively.

My guess is that Bogart could have done so, but he died at fifty-seven, just too soon for us to know how he would have made the transition from leading man to character actor. As for Powell, he retired in 1955, presumably having concluded that he didn’t care to play second fiddle to younger, lesser men. Who shall blame him? Now he belongs to the ages, and the curse of the camera has become a blessing, for we can watch him in My Man Godfrey and come away feeling as though his scenes could have been shot yesterday.

Nobody feels that way about silent films. It was the introduction of sound that opened the door to the perpetual now of the movies, in which William Powell and Humphrey Bogart seem as real to us as Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio. Within a few short years of the release of The Jazz Singer, a handful of preternaturally gifted directors, Ernst Lubitsch and Jean Renoir foremost among them, had grappled successfully with the challenge of sound and were starting to make pictures like Trouble in Paradise and La Chienne that have the snap and immediacy to which the moviegoers of the Thirties quickly became accustomed, and in which I continue to take endless delight eight decades later.

It is more than likely that I will still be around when Trouble in Paradise turns 100, and perfectly possible that I will live to celebrate the centennial of My Man Godfrey. I wonder whether very many people will be watching these films, and others of like vintage, in 2036. I hope so, though I also wonder what they’ll make of William Powell. Will his maturity seem even more alien to them than it does to the youngsters of today? Or will the harshness of life in the twenty-first century by then have forced us all to stop crying for the moon? If so, at least we’ll have the great film comedies of the Thirties to remind us that even in the worst of times, it remains possible—nay, essential—to laugh.

* * *

A scene from My Man Godfrey, directed by Gregory La Cava and starring William Powell and Carole Lombard:

A scene from High Sierra, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, and Cornel Wilde:

From 2004:

If you’re going to make a stage or screen adaptation of a familiar work of art, you really only have two viable alternatives: try to reproduce the original as closely as possible, or go your own way. Anything in between is doomed to failure….

Read the whole thing here.

“Important writing, strange to say, rarely gives the exact flavor of its period; if it is successful it presents you with the soul of man, undated.”

George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

The Mosaic Theatre Company’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf closed yesterday afternoon in Washington, D.C. It’s always bittersweet when a show comes to the end of its run, but this particular closing has a special meaning for me: it’s the first time in nearly a year that Satchmo isn’t running, in rehearsal, or in the works somewhere in America. I flew out to Chicago last December to help get Charles Newell’s Court Theatre production underway, and since then Satchmo has been performed in Chicago, San Francisco, Portsmouth, Colorado Springs, West Palm Beach, Sacramento, Washington, and Baton Rouge. I saw four of those stagings and directed one of them, but there are now three Louis Armstrongs, Jahi Kearse, Spencer Howard, and Lawrence E. Street, who have done the play without me. Like a first-born son gone off to college, Satchmo has left me behind and is now making its way in the world.

The world, it seems, isn’t done with Satchmo, at least not quite yet. Triangle Productions of Portland, Oregon, will be opening its production, the last of the 2016-17 season and the fifteenth to date, on February 2. As for 2017-18, I’ve already received an inquiry from a theater company seeking to obtain rights to the show for next season. And I even have a Satchmo-related personal appearance coming up: John Douglas Thompson and I will be speaking about Satchmo next Wednesday at New York’s Drama Book Shop, Inc.

Nevertheless, I know it’s time to start frying other fish. I’m already hard at work on my second play, about which much more later, and I’ve been talking to a regional theater company about directing another play, this one written by somebody else. As for my day job at The Wall Street Journal, it’s shifted into the high gear of a brand-new season: I saw three shows in New York last week and will be reviewing them for the Journal this week and next.

And what about Satchmo? Well, I’ve been thinking of late about my favorite scene from Bull Durham:

INT. THE DUGOUT

NUKE PUTS ON HIS WARMUP JACKET and sits down next to Crash Davis, who’s taking off his gear, readying to hit.

NUKE I was great, eh?

CRASH Your fastball was up and your curveball was hanging—in the Show they woulda ripped you.

NUKE Can’t you let me enjoy the moment?

CRASH The moment’s over.

So it is, and I’m preparing to move on to the next one, whatever and wherever it may turn out to be. But I sure have enjoyed the moment that just came to an end, as much as I’ve ever enjoyed anything in my professional life. And no matter how many more moments lay ahead of me in the years that lie ahead, I very much doubt that any of them, however exciting they are, will be quite like this one.

* * *

John Douglas Thompson and I will be talking about and signing copies of Satchmo at the Waldorf at the Drama Book Shop, Inc., 250 W. 40th St., next Wednesday, October 12, at five p.m. For more information, go here.