Archives for January 2017

“It was that night toward the end of rehearsals when everything finally comes together, and you feel that if they’d give you a chance, you could direct the affairs of nations. You could bring the entire world into harmony—you’re that good a director. Of course a night like that is usually followed by a dress rehearsal where absolutely everything goes to hell—there’ll be a short circuit in the lighting and your stage manager will come down with the mumps and your leading lady will trip on the hem of her costume and fall into the orchestra pit—but knowing that doesn’t make a speck of difference. For the moment, you’re on top of the world.”

Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter (courtesy of Mrs. T)

In today’s online Wall Street Journal I review an important Florida revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. Here’s an excerpt.

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Even though he ranks among America’s foremost living playwrights, John Guare’s work isn’t done nearly often enough in New York. This season’s Broadway revival of “Six Degrees of Separation” will be that play’s first major New York staging since the original production closed in 1992. That struck me as reason enough to catch the Florida Repertory Theatre’s revival of ”The House of Blue Leaves,” an identically important play which received a big-ticket Broadway revival in 2011 (David Cromer was the director, Ben Stiller and Edie Falco the stars) that inexplicably failed to ring the box-office bell. That version was outstanding in every way—but so is this one, directed with unshowy, profoundly comprehending skill by Chris Clavelli….

“The House of Blue Leaves,” first performed in 1971, is a fearsomely and famously tricky play to bring off, for it illustrates Mr. Guare’s pithy dictum that “farce is tragedy speeded up.” It’s the story of Artie (Greg Longenhagen), an inept blue-collar songwriter from Queens whose wife, Bananas (Rachel Burttram), is clinically depressed beyond hope of cure. He’s fallen in love with Bunny (Carrie Lund), his downstairs neighbor, a brassy golddigger who believes, God knows why, in the commercial potential of Artie’s songs (one of which rhymes “comical” with “yarmulke”) and wants him to send Bananas to an insane asylum, go to Hollywood and make his fortune—meaning her fortune.

As is his wont, Mr. Guare plays this dire situation for belly laughs, mixing in such unlikely supporting characters as a trio of ditsy nuns (Viki Boyle, Michelle Damato and Jason Parrish). But you are never allowed to lose sight for long of the dark desperation of Artie and Bananas, and when things go definitively sour, first with a bang and then a whimper, the laughter gives way to gasps—and tears….

The best American regional theater is as good as it gets, Broadway not excluded. But if I had to pick one show from the past few seasons to epitomize its excellence, it might well be Florida Rep’s “House of Blue Leaves.” It’s one of the finest stagings of a John Guare play that I’ve ever seen, anywhere.

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Florida Rep’s revival of of The House of Blue Leaves:

Excerpts from David Cromer’s 2011 Broadway production of The House of Blue Leaves, starring Ben Stiller as Artie, Edie Falco as Bananas, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Bunny:

Paul Hindemith is interviewed by Seymour Raven about the experience of leading the Chicago Symphony in a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. This extremely rare telecast was taped on April 7, 1963:

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

“The trouble with loving an actress is that once you figure out the meaning of her lines, then you have to figure out if they’re being spoken from a script or from the heart. From the heart, you first suppose. Rachel brings such skill to her acting—to her living—that you naturally thing ‘heart’ first and ‘script’ second. Every word, movement, and glance strike you as genuine. But suddenly you notice in her eyes a flicker of guile or irony or amusement and you begin to wonder; and you go to a play and you see her display some of these same words, movements and glances with the same offhand authenticity, and you wonder further. You wonder where she ever learned that lightness, that deftness, that grace. Did she learn them in life and were they therefore part of her real nature? Or did she learn them in the theater and were they therefore art?”

Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter (courtesy of Mrs. T)

Having just seen a Florida revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, one of my favorite modern plays, I did a little electronic digging and found an online version of the “Art of Theater” interview with Guare that the Paris Review published in 1992. It’s full of characteristic observations that I feel like sharing, though you really ought to read the whole thing if it’s new to you:

• “I felt at home in a theater. I loved being part of an audience. All the rules—the audience has to see the play on a certain date at a certain time in a certain place in a certain seat. You watched the stage in unison with strangers. The theater had intermissions where you could smoke cigarettes in the lobby and imagine you were interesting. The theater made everybody in the audience behave better, as if they were all in on the same secret. I found it amazing that what was up on that stage could make these people who didn’t know each other laugh, respond, gasp in exactly the same way at the same time.”

• “I learned more about basic play structure poring over the original cast albums of shows…the brainstorm that the second song was usually the ‘want’ song. And how in Guys and Dolls the need for a spot for the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York was technically no different than those three sisters yearning to get to Moscow. The need made the story. Creating the arc and completing it.”

• “In a good playwriting course you learn which playwright you write like. And why you admire that writer.”

• It’s hard to learn from somebody like [Eugene] O’Neill. He’s great in spite of his flaws. His genius has nothing to teach others except to keep writing all your life, and maybe at the end you’ll write a few masterpieces.”

• “We can only learn one lesson from Shakespeare and that’s that there are no stage directions. It never says, Juliet (in a melancholy yet noble, quixotic way). The emotions and the intentions must be firmly embedded right in the lines.”

• “I love the part of playwriting that is a craft to be learned continually, the -wright part, like shipwright or wheelwright or cartwright. Whether Aeschylus or George S. Kaufman, a playwright is a writer who understands the technical aspects of knowing how to deliver exposition, how to get a character on and offstage, where to place the intermission, how to bring down a curtain. How to have all the characters’ stories end up simultaneously. That’s craft, and craft can be taught by emulation. You figure out how your playwright of the moment accomplishes those facts of the theater. You learn to study those playwrights technically, the way a musician does a score, breaking the work down to learn how its composer achieved certain effects. And then, having learned a technique, one can use it oneself.”

• “[Samuel] Beckett’s a great writer but a bad influence.”

• “Theater is the place where you learn all your lessons in a crowd. Imagine a novelist watching five hundred people simultaneously reading a draft of a novel and then making adjustments based on their immediate responses.”

• “I always liked plays to be funny and early on stumbled upon the truth that farce is tragedy speeded up.”

• “I don’t like autobiographical work where you can tell which character is the author because he or she is the most sensitive, the most misunderstood, the most sympathetic. Everybody including yourself should be fair game.”

• “I love actors who are performers, who are clowns—meaning they are willing to make fools of themselves, to stride that brink of panic. I feel that Stanislavsky—at least the way he’s been interpreted through the Method in America—has been the enemy of performance; I’m not interested in that style of naturalism. How we escape naturalism always seems to be the key. Naturalism is great for television and the small screen. Theatrical reality happens on a much higher plane. People on a stage are enormous, there to drive us crazy. I love actors who can do that.”

• “Writing for the movies is like working on a musical. You have to recognize and accept the collaborative aspects before you start. You have to recognize what work the camera will do, what work you must not do. You underwrite a scene in the movies. The camera will pick up textures of reality that in a play would be the business of words.”

• “Theater poetry is not just highfalutin language you spray on the event like Fry’s Venus Observed. Theater poetry is response to the large event, events that force the poetry. It took me a very long time to realize the mythic size of Ibsen, to see that the mechanics of plot in an Ibsen play function the same way that fate does in Greek tragedy. Truth does not exist merely in the actor feeling the heat of the teacup.”

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A TV commercial for Jerry Zaks’ 1986 Broadway production of The House of Blue Leaves, starring John Mahoney as Artie and Swoosie Kurtz as Bananas:

From 2007:

Once a year, every working art critic should be required to attend a blockbuster show on a weekend or holiday. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to an audio tour—and pay close attention to what his fellow museumgoers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience art, and marvel at the fact that they keep coming back in spite of everything….

Read the whole thing here.

“If there is one thing I’d like people to get, it’s that if a nonfiction book is going to endure, the level of the prose in that book has to be at the same level as the level of prose in a novel that endures.”

Robert Caro (quoted in Rachel Syme, “Means of Descent,” Matter, November 16, 2016)

My Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column for this week, which has just been posted online by the Journal in light of its timeliness, is a tribute to Nat Hentoff. Here’s an excerpt.

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When Nat Hentoff died on Saturday at the age of 91, one of his sons broke the news on Twitter. That might well have amused Hentoff, a technological Luddite who never abandoned the typewriter and never established a social-media beachhead. He might also have been amused—if grimly so—by the fact that many of his obituaries devoted more space to his latter-day career as a civil libertarian than to the writings about jazz with which he made his journalistic name. Sad to say, that makes perfect sense. Not only had the music that Hentoff loved best (he died listening to the records of Billie Holiday) ceased to be central to the American cultural conversation by the time of his death, but he was a First Amendment absolutist who lived to see free speech under siege in his native land, which explains why his impassioned writings about it should now loom so large in memory. Still, few who know his work at all well are in doubt that he will be remembered longest as one of the foremost jazz commentators of the 20th century.

To be sure, the word “commentator” doesn’t quite convey the nature and range of Hentoff’s jazz-related activities. Though he wrote his share of concert and record reviews in his youth, he wasn’t exactly a jazz critic, nor was he a scholar or a musician. Instead, he was something equally important—an intelligent enthusiast with good taste and a receptive ear. The National Endowment for the Arts summed him up well when, in 2004, it honored Hentoff with one of its Jazz Master awards, describing him as a “jazz advocate.” In that capacity he was nonpareil: No writer did more for jazz.

Hentoff himself believed that “if anything I’ve written about this music lasts, it will be the interviews I’ve done with the musicians for more than 50 years….My hope is that some of them become part of jazz histories.” That was just what happened. One of the last living links to the founding fathers of jazz, he knew and interviewed most of the great musicians whose paths he crossed through the years, and a considerable number of the familiar quotes and anecdotes that long ago passed into the common stock of jazz reference can be traced back to his pieces….

He wrote about many other kinds of artists, among them Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and Bob Wills, for the Journal and virtually every other newspaper and magazine of consequence. But it was jazz that spoke most strongly to him, and it may well be that his signal achievement as an advocate was to help choose the roster of musicians who performed on “The Sound of Jazz,” the legendary 1957 TV special on which the illustrious likes of Holiday, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Pee Wee Russell, Ben Webster and Lester Young were seen playing in a casual jam-session setting. “For me, it was a jazz fan’s fantasy come true,” Hentoff recalled 50 years after the show first aired on CBS. It was also a priceless gift to posterity: To this day “The Sound of Jazz” continues to be widely regarded as the finest jazz program ever telecast….

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Read the whole thing here.

A complete kinescope of “The Sound of Jazz,” originally telecast live by CBS on December 8, 1957: